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from the how-it-works-is-up-in-the-air dept.
How Does Starlink Work Anyway?:
No matter what you think of Elon Musk, it's hard to deny that he takes the dictum "There's no such thing as bad publicity" to heart. From hurling sports cars into orbit to solar-powered roof destroyers, there's little that Mr. Musk can't turn into a net positive for at least one of his many ventures, not to mention his image.
Elon may have gotten in over his head, though. His plan to use his SpaceX rockets to fill the sky with thousands of satellites dedicated to providing cheap Internet access ran afoul of the astronomy community, which has decried the impact of the Starlink satellites on observations, both in the optical wavelengths and further down the spectrum in the radio bands. And that's with only a tiny fraction of the planned constellation deployed; once fully built-out, they fear Starlink will ruin Earth-based observation forever.
What exactly the final Starlink constellation will look like and what impact it would have on observations depend greatly on the degree to which it can withstand regulatory efforts and market forces. Assuming it does survive and gets built out into a system that more or less resembles the current plan, what exactly will Starlink do? And more importantly, how will it accomplish its stated goals?
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday February 24 2020, @02:11AM (1 child)
^THIS^
If you're going to fuck up the sky for every single person that would fall in love with astronomy, then the least you owe us is obviating the need for ground based observatories. Use that massive amount of bandwidth to deliver high quality astronomy images to everyone in the world that wants to look at it. Starlink Astronomical CDN built-in to each satellite to more easily distribute popular astronomical data. For for scientific community, those very high earth orbit satellite installations you spoke off.
If a kid could point his tablet up to the sky, and then received a processed image of the sky with zoom capabilities, then yes, perhaps proper compensation has been made for taking the stars from us.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2020, @09:55PM
Buncha socialist nonsense!