Both Trump and Elon have body counts. Trump killed thousands upon thousands. Elon has killed dozens at least. Which has nothing to do with both of them slurping Putin’s talking point alphabet soup down.
Putin is not the capitalist you think he is. Even as an oligarch he is not even in the ballpark of Musk, Trump and far right white fascists, considering Russia is the key anti-imperialist force that openly dunks on Nazis.
For real. This seems like something that threatens musk and space x more than anybody else. The CIA effectively has unlimited money to replace whatever Russia takes down, but musk needing to pay to replace satellites to maintain starlink will hurt his bottom line. I don’t think tin foil hat wearers would be all that unreasonable to make the assumption that this is a veiled threat to keep musk in line. I frequently hear the argument that “billionaires can’t be bought” but I believe the exact opposite. They care more about money than morals and ethics, and can therefore be coerced by it either through hurting their bottom line or rewarding them with more of it. A dragon’s hoard can never be too big for the dragon to accept more, and nothing hurts the drain more than reducing its hoard.
Starlink launches forty-ish Starlink sats every other week, Russia could deplete it’s entire arsenal of missiles and, if they’re lucky, cause a hole in their coverage.
Did you read the comment? It’s not about LEO satellites. It’s about a military arsenal destroying a fleet of LEO satellites. The satellites won’t do a Kessler, but a fleets worth of shrapnel would be a problem.
Maybe, but one of the best traits about Musk is he’s willing to throw money at this regardless of profit. So he’s gunna keep throwing up more of these satellites, while Russia’s rocket supply is only going to get harder to resupply for the foreseeable future.
I don’t think it is… one of the satellites cost USD 250k in 2019. it is likely cheaper now.
There have been Anti Satellite Weapon tests (for example from China) to see if it is feasible. The cost for such an attack would be much much higher than 250k (we are talking multiple millions)
Hmm you made me think and if they use their reusable rockets tech and maybe some other similar things, it may be cheaper in the end because they save a lot of money in places where others don’t
Really? You can put up 50 starlinks at a time for tens of millions of dollars, whereas asats need a more expensive an maneuverable kill vehicle and a launch for each one with lots more complicated targeting and maneuvering. It’s pretty hard to track and follow something down moving so fast through space and hit it. Plus Russia just doesn’t have the launch capacity to put up that much mass to orbit.
Not to mention that SpaceX has designed things so that they can piggyback starlink deployments on the back of other commercial launches. So, for example, AT&T pays them $25 million to launch a new telecom satellite, and they toss in another dozen or so starlink satellites along with it.
AT&T pays for the majority of the launch costs and starlink benefits from it.
As someone who spends a lot of time in the outdoors, I have to disagree with you. I’m very excited about how this will simplify logistics, and make getting weather etc much easier.
The skies are already polluted with Starlink satellites and there's even more coming. I agree that is does solve some situations, but it's being done for profit, not for undeveloped areas. Sticking more shit in our skies for money is really sad, I am surprised there's not more international regulations for this kind of satellite spam.
Oh it does, despite you not understanding it. The point is that even though someone does something for money, that does not mean what they do is not harmful.
And before you ask say this does not have to do anything with this topic, the reason I said that, is that I think what spacex is doing here is harmful.
In your “this is such a lemmy comment” reply you sounded to be condeming the other user for their anti-spacex opinion.
Also, I’ve fixed a typo in my previous comment, in the part of it that you have quoted. The quote is fine, just telling it in case it has caused misunderstanding.
Their opinion seemed to be a combination of hatred for capitalism and Elon Musk, and they came off to me as being grasping at straws to justify that opinion.
Of course cell towers are an eye sore. Though they are more necessary than starlink, often hidden by landscape or on top of buildings anyway. It's not the "gotcha" comparison you think it is.
Perhaps necessary was the wrong word, though I don't know if starlink supports the same bands the towers already do for 2G, 3G, 4G etc. They don't obstruct our skies, so that's much preferable.
Starlink sats are only visible to the naked eye when they’ve just launched, once in orbit they’re only a problem for ground based optical astronomy, and even then it doesn’t seem to be as much of a problem as everyone makes out.
I get that you probably hate Musk, but a lot of the points you’re making are just nonsense.
If there were more third-world people here they’d probably agree with you as well. Last I checked there’s like one or two cables going into the entire continent of Africa.
It’s actually a really good idea, with the main exception being the impact on astronomy. That Musk happens to be the guy behind this first network is just an unfortunate coincidence.
As a person who lives in the third world I absolutely do not want the internet to only be controlled by American corporations from space and would much rather fund proper fiber optics and connections.
Ah. Yeah, I guess that’s true. It is an American thing. Would you feel better if it was European or Chinese?
Wire infrastructure is great, but it’s just damn expensive, and manufacturing+laying it can be very specialised labour. Even here in Canada not everyone has it in rural areas. Meanwhile, small satellite swarms pass over everywhere by force of geometry, and are actually still pretty fast internet.
Not really, but of that list only China hasn’t directly colonized the country I live or send storm troopers into the forest to murder people in the past decade. I would like the taxes we pay here to go towards developing ourselves, we can pay to educate networking engineers and subsidize the work ourselves and hook into the internet as a peer instead of as a subscriber. Third world countries aren’t poor because we have no money, we’re poor because we’re trapped in bad loan agreements, have lopsided international investment and bad interior planning which prefers plantation cash crops over food security.
I still don’t want the Americans to be controlling literally anything I use or interact with. They will harvest that data to execute military operations against leftists where I live. No fucking thanks, keep your Starlink.
There are more sats than asat missiles. The math doesn’t work out. Unless they use nukes or shotgun blasts or something to make the entirety of leo unusable.
I’d be worried about debris flung into steeply elliptical orbits, though. It wouldn’t take much to do some real damage to sats in higher orbits and once the cascade starts there’s not much we can do but wait decades for the worst of it to fall into the atmosphere.
Those steeply elliptical orbits would probably deorbit even quicker since a random impulse that boosts the apogee is likely to lower the perigee even more.
Kessler syndrome is only a threat to satellites that are orbiting within the debris, it's not really a danger if you're only passing through (as a ballistic missile would).
Add comment