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MyDudeNak t1_jaxvuws wrote

Reply to comment by Pigs_in_the_Porridge in Half of all active satellites are now from SpaceX. Here’s why that may be a problem by ye_olde_astronaut

Human advancement requires sacrifices. Professional astronomy will be fine, and it's hard for me to care that a hobbyist will not be able to image a particular galaxy quite as easy.

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alexanderpas t1_jaxy593 wrote

> Professional astronomy will be fine

Uhmm...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-023-01903-3

> [...] Observations affected by artificial satellites can become unusable for scientific research [...] SpaceX has been launching Starlink satellites [...] bright satellites could mess up their view of the cosmos by leaving streaks on telescope images as they glide past [...] Even the Hubble Space Telescope, which orbits more than 500 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, is vulnerable to these satellite streaks, as well as those from other satellite constellations.[..] we scanned the archive of Hubble Space Telescope images taken between 2002 and 2021. We find that [..] of 2.7% of the individual exposures with a typical exposure time of 11 minutes are crossed by satellites and that [...] increases with time. [...] With the growing number of artificial satellites currently planned, [...] Hubble Space Telescope images crossed by satellites will increase in the next decade

You can't get more professional than a telescope in actual space.

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Adeldor t1_jaxzcb9 wrote

Hubble's orbit has decayed over time. If proposals to reboost it come to pass (by SpaceX, no less), the problem will be ameliorated. If not, the telescope's near end of life anyway.

Meanwhile, future spaceborne telescopes are destined increasingly for far orbits (eg L2) to avoid the biggest photobomber of all - the Earth itself. In LEO it obscures nearly half the sky, limiting greatly what can be observed when - especially for long duration exposures. Far orbits bypass both that and satellite constellations.

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Pigs_in_the_Porridge t1_jay512g wrote

By "human advancement" you mean "enriching Elon Musk."

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Jakebsorensen t1_jayb09h wrote

By “human advancement” he means stable internet connections across the globe

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PEVEI t1_jayebsj wrote

On what planet can Starlink service such a large customer base with a reasonable amount of throughput per user?

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FlingingGoronGonads t1_jayo0xt wrote

I commend you for trying, but I'm pretty sure you're never going to get through to people stuck in the Musk personality cult. A person who unironically says things like

> Human advancement requires sacrifices

after all the environmental degradation we've seen in the last 200 years of industrialization, and 50 years after "Tragedy of the Commons" was first published, can probably never be made whole. As for the callous and inhuman attitudes you find with Starlink fanatics, this is what I think of when they talk about what they call "human advancement".

Never before has a new industry worked so hard to destroy the very science that birthed it.

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