These issues only affect a specific form of photography taken under select conditions, and even then can be dealt with quite easily in software, making the problem at most an extremely minor nuisance to a select few. Conversely, very large numbers of people live in remote locations where satellite communication is by far the most sensible method of connecting them to the internet. It seems a small price to pay.
[The following was the original flagged comment, which I'm leaving for completeness but shouldn't have posted as such]
Oh no, extremely long exposure photographs at certain wavelengths taken under select conditions need a small amount of additional post processing which is trivially automated. How dare those rural peasants who want to connect to the rest of humanity inconvenience us so!
Please do not take HN threads into flamewar hell, regardless of how provocative someone else's statement is or you feel it is. That is the way a forum like this destroys itself, and that is in none of our interests.
Certainly the OP is not optimal for a thoughtful, substantive discussion. But responding to flamebait with flamewar is exactly what the HN guidelines ask everyone not to do here.
The thing to do with such a provocation is to leave it where you found it and move on to more interesting things. Dragging it into the comments and setting it on fire is definitely not the thing to do. I know how tempting it is, though; it's a temptation we all need to cultivate resistance to, which is hard work.
Incidentally, the problem is a co-creation between comments and upvotes, and the upvotes are the greater factor. But there's no way to respond to the upvoters except by responding to the commenter. I try not to come across as picking on the commenter personally, but I know it can still feel that way.
Well hopefully I've given them something a little better to vote on now. And I for one am a fan of your moderation style, sorry again for making your job a little harder than it has to be.
IT would be interesting to see these photographs after processed. It is true they have software that tracks satellites and removes those sections from the long exposure so all the lines would go away i wonder where they have lots of intersections what loss of resolution would be if/ how close to threshold of usability image is. worse case is all night there is some satellite in a region so have to throw all away
On the face of it, a composite image of space that has no adjustments being ruined by 2x the number of satellites does seem pretty bad and damaging for researchers. Beyond that, it still might be worth it to actually be able to provide internet to people that either don't have access, have an insane cost to access, and/or have a bad provider currently.
The argument I've seen is that this stuff can be adjusted for and that most researchers have already had to adjust for it (since there are ~1500 non-Starlink satellites already). Is that just an utter fallacy?
You're correct that they are no longer visible to the naked eye. They're reduced down to (right now) approximately 6th magnitude and SpaceX is trying to get them down to 7th magnitude. The human eye in a perfectly or almost perfectly dark sky can see down to roughly (humans vary quite a bit) 6th magnitude but it would be very hard, especially for a moving object.
In order to see 6th magnitude you need a very dark sky (no moon or clouds, low humidity, no human populations anywhere nearby), you would need to dark adapt for over 30 minutes with no viewing of any sources of light, you'd need to be pretty young, and then you'd need to use averted-vision viewing where you look near an object, but not directly at it such that you can use the higher density of rods in the rest of your eye in order to see the object. You'd then have a chance of seeing current Starlink satellites, but you'd see a ton of other satellites as well as there's many satellites above 6th magnitude. (In 2017 or so I was in rural Nebraska the night before the solar eclipse and it felt like there was a half dozen visible satellites in the sky at any given time.)
However that doesn't mean they're not visible to telescopes.
They are no longer visible to the naked eye. The satellites are initially inserted at ~half their final orbit. They then boot up, deploy their solar panels horizontally to reduce drag, and then fire up their engines for the boost to their final orbit. This takes about a month or so. Once there, they rotate their panels to point away from the earth, which greatly reduces their apparent brightness.
Obviously you can remove the satellite traces from the image, but each of them causes a degradation in quality, i.e. a reduction in the signal-to-noise ratio, because the light coming from the sky zones obscured by the satellites has not been captured by the sensors.
Regardless how well you might process the sky images, the large increase in the number of satellites will reduce their quality.
It makes sense that each frame would suffer from signal-to-noise problems and be degraded, but given that this image was created over 2 hours -- is there really any loss in quality if sampled correctly? I could honestly believe there are a bunch of complexities beyond this, but: is this already having to be done _anyway_?
> Regardless how well you might process the sky images, the large increase in the number of satellites will reduce their quality.
Right, this is the true statement of the issue. However is a _marginal_ loss in image data quality really not that bad a thing to ask for for getting internet across the planet effectively (in human history terms) overnight?
What's the point of this profane tweet? Starlink is rural people's best hope of finally not being an afterthought, not just in America, but around the world. And this problem can be trivially solved with stacking.
There's nothing of substance here, just more internet vitriol.
No, you're embedding a bunch of viewpoints in this comment as facts when there is absolutely room for disagreement.
For example I think "rural people's best hope of finally not being an afterthought" is massive government infrastructure projects that don't factor in profitability. Note that I am not trying to _have_ this discussion here, just pointing out that it's a valid disagreement.
And the author of that tweet it seems considers this a loss of an ancient and fundamental shared planetary resource. I think anger is an understandable, even appropriate reaction to that perception!
The point is to get people to talk about it and maybe also not just accept the neoliberal consensus about the role of technology and infrastructure and their externalities. Seems to have succeeded by that measure.
There is plenty of substance here but you're using the author's anger and profanity as an excuse to not engage with it.
How is a massive government infrastructure program that doesn't exist an alternative to a satellite system that does exist? If I'm out in a rural location I can either use satellites for internet or the non-existent government program?
It's also clearly not a loss of an ancient planetary resource. The satellites can't be seen with the naked eye so the vast majority won't notice. Astral photographers and astronomers may have to do slightly more post-processing on certain types of images, but that hardly seems like a big deal.
I can sympathize with the extreme emotions on display here. Some things are worth shouting about. Some things are worth saying "fuck you" about. Some things are that important.
That said, yes, we should focus on the big picture in places like HN. That doesn't mean we ignore or disparage the mere mortals who care so much about the sky.
Not to minimize the impact that large constellations *could* have on ground-based astronomy, but without more context, this isn't really "proof" of anything.
A follow-up tweet[0] says "If you take the 2-hr video and stack the images, the astronomical wonders appear to get lost behind the web of satellite trails. 60s exposures, 4.4degX4.4deg", but was there some astronomical objective behind stacking 2 hours worth of frames, or was this just done to create a pretty/scary picture?
The tweet is even misleading. If you stack frames normally that transient data is removed, the "star trails" disappear. It's only in this other type of stacking are non-transient things not removed and instead amplified.
It is way too early to call this a "failure" and the problem here is not Musk himself doing this but the governmental regulation that allows it. If Musk wasn't putting up these satellites, someone else would. Maybe not today, but eventually.
As a society we need to do a better job blaming the systems that allow something to happen rather than the individuals who exist in and use that system.
It sucks to lose something you always had and took for granted. I wonder what the reverse situation would look like - if everyone on the planet had easy access to high speed satellite internet, and astronomers came along and insisted we had to pull the whole thing down so we could study stars. Would that be an equal or un-equal tragedy?
The comparison is really meaningless, because for looking towards the surrounding space there is no other way, while for Internet access there are many alternatives both cheaper and faster than a network of satellites.
Many years ago I have worked as a designer of equipment for long-distance wireless communication links for Internet access.
I have no doubt that it would be possible to cover all the remote areas of USA with a network of towers with directional antennas for the links between themselves at a lower cost and with better performance than SpaceX's constellation of satellites.
The reason why this has not been done is not technical. The fact that the communication services offered by SpaceX are more advantageous than the alternatives available in USA is a historical accident, not something caused by objective reality.
The difference between the solution implemented by SpaceX and a ground-based solution is that to be able to provide their services SpaceX occupies resources that they do not own.
The sky does not belong to SpaceX, I and billions of other humans who will never use the services of SpaceX have as much rights to the sky as the SpaceX customers, so SpaceX is stealing from us to serve their customers.
This is the same like someone who chooses to smoke in a public place besides me. I do not care if he smokes at his home, that is his right, but if he smokes besides me and forces me to inhale his smoke, I consider that an aggression.
In the same way, occupying the sky with satellites is a nuisance and an aggression towards all those who are not SpaceX customers and who have not agreed that SpaceX may use in this way something that belongs to all humans, not to an US company or to an US agency.
What would you recommend Jacob Calderwood, of Utqiaġvik, Alaska, use? He wrote a letter to the FCC, asking the FCC to approve the modification to Starlink that would allow it use lower orbits.
You can find his letter on the FCC licensing page, here:
One thing he points out is that while he has broadband, something meeting the minimal definition costs $500 a month.
A nice thing about Starlink is that it will be able to cover the US and the rest of the world, and provide an upper limit to the price of broadband. And it's timeframe is not that far off - they will have about 6,000 satellites deployed in 2024, and all 12,000 deployed by 2027.
> because for looking towards the surrounding space there is no other way
This doesn't prevent them from looking outwards towards the surrounding space. It just makes the data a bit more noisy once processing is completed. It doesn't completely obscure anything (unless that thing was incredibly faint and near the noise floor anyway).
> while for Internet access there are many alternatives both cheaper and faster than a network of satellites.
If there were "many alternatives both cheaper and faster", people would not be going literally crazy over waiting for the service to become available at their premises. You can see such people moping and complaining on threads everywhere while they wait for service to become available. For the market where Starlink is wanted there are often no options that are faster and in some cases not even any options that are cheaper. I've heard several anecdotes of people who were paying $200+ a month for around 1 mbps for internet service before they got Starlink.
What I find kind of frustrating about all of this is that it's really a lack of mandated and/or publicly-funded investment in infrastructure that even makes starlink appealing. When electricity came about, there was a massive project to electrify rural areas, so we didn't need to launch a constellation of satellites beaming microwave power to the whole planet. And now electricity is ubiquitous. There's no quibbling about whether a given area is profitable or not, because electricity is seen as a necessity for modern life. Internet should be seen the same way, and the necessary physical infrastructure should be built. The only reason it hasn't is that the telecom companies have bought out the government. So instead, we get these end-runs around the system that have massive externalities.
I for one think the Supreme Court is the one who ruined everything. Verizon Inc v FCC (2002)[1] dismantled the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which had been working effectively to decouple physical infrastructure from internet service providing.
The Supreme Court sided with Verizon, who said basically "fiber is too expensive for us to be able to deploy, unless we get a monopoly over the infrastructure we build".
This has lead to enormous stagnation. DSL remained a competitive service, with a variety of competing entities, in the 90's & early aughts, because it still remained under the Telecommunications Act, of unbundled network elements, because of unbundled local loops. As soon as one company was allowed to own the infrastructure & every means to connect over it, the system of competition & innovation that had been working went away.
Now a days we have municipal service providers getting started. They too will exist in these same terms, as local infrastructure monopolies. They won't have a regulatory framework that systems like POTS / copper have, won't have any standards for cooperation / competition, since fiber as a whole has never been unbundled. Overall, I see this as a great potential weakness for municipal isps, and it's something I think the left & right might be interested in rectifying. It could be done municipality by municipality, with promises, but I for one think many people on many sides of the political spectrum have an interest in fixing this radical overreach & colossal corporate favoritism that was gifted by the Supreme Court.
Starlink _is_ publicly funded infrastructure, to the tune of $885M of subsidies through federal aid for rural broadband. We have the technology to send the internet down from space, and arguably with a lower environmental impact than running fiber to the same places.
Building physical infrastructure isn't without environmental cost.
> The only reason it hasn't is that the telecom companies have bought out the government.
I don't think this is true really. There's been a really big shift in the last 50-ish years and at least in the US there seems to be a general consensus that projects of this nature are no longer the domain of the government.
I mean the telecom thing is a factor sure but I don't think you'd see that level of investment in infrastructure for anything else at this point either.
If we had had microwave power beaming satellites in the thirties, we might have used those instead of wiring up farms. In many developing countries, there still is no landline phone service because they just use mobile phones instead. I don't see what the problem is for some people that are in more remote locations to use satellite internet instead of wired, especially if, as in the case of Starlink, the performance is reasonably comparable.
Can't this be removed in software? I'm not a photography expert, but it seems like the satellites are predictable in intensity and position. I assume you could analyze a long exposure or individual frames of it and pick out and remove the satellites pretty easily.
The tweeter also complains about the high price of space based telescopes, but neglects that starlink funds (or will fund) Space X which may substantially reduce the cost of putting up big space telescopes in the future.
If what you want is an accurate view of the sky, then no: once you've taken the picture with the satellite in it, any technique that removes the satellite cannot add back in what it obscured by taking up space in the picture.
Image editing cannot make this better for science, only for art.
The standard technique is called stacking, wherein you take many images and combine them to reduce noise. There is a fair amount of software out there that makes it pretty easy.
Not to defend Starlink or purveyors of other obtrusive orbital spraff, but how much astronomical imaging is optical/non-computational these days?
As a non-astronomer my curiosity is, given publicly available ephemera for the microsat constellations, could a post-processing stage reasonably remove their streaks from the exposures being summed together?
Granted this would probably only be feasible for non-hobbyists.
This happens with airplanes too. You just have to reject the parts of the frames from the stack that have the nearby object in the view. Sure if we were using film this would be a problem, but with good software you can do some amazing deep sky imaging using nothing but a 12 inch telescope and a DSLR.
This really seems like a UX problem. We’re trained in the UX of long exposure film, and tools to do it differently aren’t built into the cameras these people use.
Pretty sure the iPhone’s long exposure doesn’t amplify moving objects
That said, let’s tax satellites and fund, I dunno, space cleanup or astronomy or some such. Maybe treat space more like an earth wide resource and less like the Wild West.
It's more than an UX problem. It's an signal integrity issue and the only way around it for all kinds of measurement is to only look where there is no Starlink. An area that grows ever smaller with the pissing contest between mega constellations owned by billionaires. Taxing and having placement in LEO controlled is a good idea. We should also leave space for developing nations.
I've yet to see any radio astronomy or infrared astronomy images of Starlink satellites (that are not also from solar reflections). If you have sources, feel free to post them.
It's never permanent until it is. Cue 'forever chemicals' that were definitely harmless. Cue CO2 emissions - no one ever thought it's an issue until it is literally an existential threat. Cue nuclear waste - "nah, we'll figure it out".
I really do wonder if Kessler syndrome will happen, with the amount of cheap&cheerful stuff we are sending into space.
Not likely unless you by court mean US court. If any other court find that there's evidence this is bad for some reason then nothing will happen. Space should be decided over by everyone. We need better, more restrictive, laws.
If China/Russia/Iran/North Korea launches a lot of satellites is that okay too? What if they mainly fly around above the US for whatever reason? If space is free the US can't complain.
> If China/Russia/Iran/North Korea launches a lot of satellites is that okay too? What if they mainly fly around above the US for whatever reason? If space is free the US can't complain.
This has been already been happening since the Cold War. So yes, the US is used to it.
> As a researcher, to those who backed Musk and the like on this bullshit vanity project; Fuck you, he's stealing the fucking sky from us
Why does the sky only belong to researchers and not all of humanity? The number of humans interested in faster internet far exceeds the number of humans interested in earth-based telescopes.
I’m not a researcher, and when I look at that photo, I feel like the sky is being stolen. It’s that it’s for one man’s company, not for all humanity. The lack of internet coverage in the US is a solvable problem driven by idiotic politics, and land based solutions will always be lower latency/faster if built right.
> subject to the whims of a company controlled by one man
There are several other competitors with satellites already in orbit or launches scheduled. So, assuming there is no collusion, competitive pressure should ameliorate a lot of the concerns about concentration of control.
Some of the competitors are even partly owned by governments (e.g. OneWeb and the UK govt) and thus look slightly more like a public utility.
> subject to the whims of a company controlled by one man.
If we see said one man actually controlling who has access, I think that's an appropriate time to take issue, and I expect many people would take issue.
No it doesn't. The full constellation of Starlink satellites will not have enough bandwidth for that. It can only provide access to a small fraction of the population, and they need to be in areas where the population density of Starlink users is not top high.
You’re totally right to an extent. It means that any solution to that problem is political of course, rather than technical. This is an interesting example where a company’s business model is effectively a technical workaround to a political problem
> Starlink/OneWeb/Kuiper solve a much bigger problem than just rural US coverage.
Such as? The only use cases it addresses are upper class users who want to go off-grid, and state/military operations (Already being tested by US forces btw).
> Not necessarily true due to the speed of transmission in fiber vs. speed of light in vacuum (once the Starlink laser links are set up).
Absolutely misleading argument. I can push a trickle of water at the speed of light it would still not allow me to watch netflix in 4k. The issue with satellite internet is channel capacity.
Also bandwith wise the satellite has to keep plexing between all user nodes in it's range. You go beyond a few thousands users and your speed starts dropping. that can only be addressed by adding more and more satellites, where do you stop?
There are already loads of NGOs (e.g. [3]) operating in rural developing nations to install solar power for village community centers. It's a small step to install a shared satellite internet terminal at the same time.
The jump in quality of life and opportunities from zero connectivity to a 100MBps shared village link is massive. You hugely expand access to telehealth, weather information, education opportunities, etc.
If Elon Musk aims sees building vacuum tunnels for trains as an option he could also build large enough vacuum tubes to send signal through. Those will be faster than a satellite.
> I’m not a researcher, and when I look at that photo, I feel like the sky is being stolen.
Unfortunately photos often distort reality, (which is the author's intent here). They purposefully stacked the multiple images in such a way to amplify the satellites clarity, rather than stacking them in a way that would instead have resulted in a clear sky but a slightly elevated noise floor.
I guess we will need to find a way for telescope based research to interference with internet connectivity...
Lets say, maybe a couple of Astronomy PHds students whose thesis just got ruined, could start a new SETI project. Or more light and gravity studies of Einstein findings :-)
I would guess a couple of lasers randomly firing upwards from an Telescope site could not possibly cause issues for low earth satellites, could it ? ;-)
I guess one answer is that there's an asymmetry here. There are many terrestrial options for internet service, but there's only one sky to observe. The terrestrial options would need to be funded, but I am skeptical that would be such an unsurmountable task. On the other hand, once all the satellites are up, clean observation of the sky becomes impossible.
> On the other hand, once all the satellites are up, clean observation of the sky becomes impossible.
The satellites are actively controlled and can be commanded to deorbit. If a court ordered it (incredibly unlikely), SpaceX could immediately order all the satellites to deorbit. This is a reversible situation if such a need arose.
Or we could use a tiny fraction of the economic potential enabled by global, ubiquitous high-speed internet to put a few more telescopes in space? Laying cable across the globe also seems like it would be a whole lot more expensive and environmentally harmful than a few extra satellite launches.
There are some measurements we are not able to do in space (until we have habitats in orbit) due to tuning and experimentation required, size and heating/cooling constraints ... However some new experiments can be done in space, so some branches of astronomy will loose, a few selected will win.
The environmental argument is an interesting one and i have no idea on the total lifetime damage of both solutions. The heaviest digging will be required where there are humans living any way. Laying cables and maintenance while probably more expensive also has some benefits such a high paying jobs, distributed all over the world instead of increasing the worlds Gini coefficient further. I would recognize Starlink as a good idea (outweighing the negatives) if it would be public infrastructure but that train has sailed.
With launches getting cheaper and cheaper, just launch an orbiting telescope.
Also, the picture shared seems pretty clickbaity. Not sure who took it but they must be amateurs if they can't mask objects obviously moving on known orbits between frames.
A state of the art earth based telescope can be 4 stories high and 30 meters across. Even exceptionally cheap orbital launch will have trouble competing on cost with such telescopes.
Random musings, but this twitter account is quite "out there", I do wonder who follows these types of people such that they get popular enough to get posted on to hacker news. The account only has 1000 followers.
This, combined with the really mediocre service available from Starlink[0], combined with the plan to put up many thousands more satellites, is truly disheartening.
Yea, I wish we’d go back to the “Google fiber” days of a disruptive tech company laying cable and fiber optics everywhere. And before someone says it, Yes yes, Google bad, but I liked the initiative.
Google was making it work before incumbent companies sued and blocked them[0].
The problem with broadband in the US is not technical, and it's not solely distances or the nature of rural spaces. It's political and economic. We managed to deliver electricity and then telephone to everyone with a push from the federal government, we could do it again.
But now AT&T, Comcast and Time-Warner are too powerful, so we end up with ground-based telescopes suffering instead.
Please don't use hyperbole like this as some people believe it and it confuses the conversation. Starlink will not erase the night sky. Starlink in operational orbits is not human eye visible. This is only a concern for ground based telescopes, not the average person viewing the night sky.
Don't cite the verge article. They failed to even set up the service properly and then complained that they didn't get good service. Every starlink customer complained that it was completely misreported. It's called "RTFM".
The only complaints I've seen involve two hours of obstruction, which seem like they'd be hard to resolve without major effort the author admitted he didn't want to go through for a trial product he would not be keeping. Cutting down trees or running cable long distances or building tall towers all seem like pretty drastic choices.
In the end, politicians with enough will to stand up to the terrible telco conglomerates currently holding back rural broadband would be a better answer here in the US, no need to pollute the sky. Launch a federal program like those that ensured electricity and telephone to every rural customer, with a generous minimum speed, and customers for Starlink in the US drop to near-zero.
> The only complaints I've seen involve two hours of obstruction, which seem like they'd be hard to resolve without major effort the author admitted he didn't want to go through for a trial product he would not be keeping. Cutting down trees or running cable long distances or building tall towers all seem like pretty drastic choices.
Yeah many Starlink customers do exactly that or hire someone to do that for them. They've had to do similar drastic measures in many cases to even get service at all via microwave antennas on tall towers or LTE antennas on tall towers or other such things. The guy wasn't desperate for good internet, which is why he didn't feel it was worth it.
But practically every solution is "horrible at best" for these users who want Starlink where nothing else is available.
Also I find it hard to say "100+ mbps with 95%+ uptime (improving with time) for $100/month" as "mediocre service". That's quite good service and revolutionary service for the people unmet by other services. Even if you need to do a bit of handiwork (much more common in rural areas) to get it installed.
What I think is infuriating that companies and countries can just put up as many satellites up there as they want.
If you put dangerous[1][2] garbage in the sky you should have some responsibility to keep it safe and clean up.
IMHO the risk of putting these things up outweigh any potential benefit for underserved regions. Musk could've also invested in ground-based communications infrastructure.
Firstly, that Kurzgesagt video had numerous errors in it including ridiculously false lines like "3-4 satellites are getting destroyed this way every year." The source for that specific line was a politician, not a scientist. The video is not a legitimate source.
Secondly, the Kessler syndrome is believed to already be happening by some, but it's a slow process that occurs over 10s to 100s of years and doesn't result in any of the popular depictions like in Gravity or in Wall-e. The Kessler syndrome also does not happen at altitudes where debris are rapidly removed by the atmosphere, which is where Starlink operates in. So even if you were to spontaneously blow up all the Starlink satellites (not at all realistic), the debris would be largely removed after less than a decade.
Thirdly, as mentioned Starlink operates specifically in a region of space that is reasonably rapidly (within the order of a few years) cleared up of any non-functioning satellites or debris.
Fourthly, you can't call operational satellites with the ability to actively avoid debris and other satellites "dangerous garbage". You could use that term for cubesats with no on-board propulsion possibly, but not Starlink.
> IMHO the risk of putting these things up outweigh any potential benefit for underserved regions.
The risk is overstated and it's easy to ignore the benefits if it doesn't improve your own life.
> Musk could've also invested in ground-based communications infrastructure.
If it was so cheap to improve ground-based communications infrastructure it would have been done already. (And it has been in most areas of many European countries because of the density of their populations, but that's not true everywhere)
[The following was the original flagged comment, which I'm leaving for completeness but shouldn't have posted as such]
Oh no, extremely long exposure photographs at certain wavelengths taken under select conditions need a small amount of additional post processing which is trivially automated. How dare those rural peasants who want to connect to the rest of humanity inconvenience us so!