Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Adeldor t1_jaifbtv wrote

Don't conflate my comments with political denial. The point of my responses:

  • the sky is not falling (if you'll pardon the pun). Astronomers - professional and amateur (I count myself among the latter) - continue to operate successfully, what with the tools that are available now to ameliorate the effects of yet higher flying satellites (illuminated for longer periods) and aircraft (illuminated at all hours of the night).

  • Truly global high speed, low latency internet has huge benefits on society, from providing access to remote communities, to assisting those defending their lands. Even without considering the impossibility of global mobile operation otherwise, there's no other kind of system capable of such ubiquitous coverage.

  • a longer term/fuzzier point - beyond terrestrial mitigations, space based observatories are and will be supplementing ground-based telescopes. The technologies that make constellations cost effective will no doubt feed into making more space-borne instruments feasible.

I've seen it written that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, etc don't own the sky, and this is certainly true. However, neither do astronomers. Constellations are beyond the point of proving their dramatic worth, so they're here regardless of opinion. Observatories and constellation operators will work together and cooperate because there's no alternative.

7