Starlink is just the first company doing it this way. Many will follow. Regulation is required. At some point the starlinks will fall to earth and the new ones replacing them will need to be regulated.
I was at a recent sat-comms conference where this was strongly argued for: The number of LEO birds (and associated spectrum usage) has dramatically increased over the last 5 years and shows no sign of stopping.
Sky and spectrum are international resources, and international regulation is undoubtedly required at a UN level via the ITU (who regulate international spectrum usage), yet the UN remains slow to act.
What if that regulation blocks progress like direct cell to satellite connectivity. Just to keep astronomers happy, which would be better off using space based telescopes anyway.
> What if that regulation blocks progress like direct cell to satellite connectivity.
What if? It appears that we collectively need to decide what uses we prefer.
> Just to keep astronomers happy, which would be better off using space based telescopes anyway.
Alternatively, why seriously restrict the ability to engage in research just because some people want to be able to talk directly to a satellite from their cell phone?
The reality is that nobody is going to get everything they want out of this. Compromise is required, and compromise means that nobody is going to be entirely happy.
This is not "just to keep astronomers happy", because the science gleaned from astronomy benefits all of us, and relying solely on space-based telescopes is far from feasible.
For things like the Square Kilometre Array it's simply impossible to place them in space using current technology, and satellite constellations that leak too much unnecessary RF energy will destroy the investment we've made in them.
That also doesn't take into account things like space weather monitoring and forecasting, which also relies on highly sensitive distributed earth-based receivers.
Good regulation allows for both progress and an avoidance of a tragedy of the commons situation where unregulated satellites emit so much unnecessary RF energy that ground-based radio astronomy becomes impossible.
No, it'll just mean we get less astronomy done, because the cost of doing any sort of astronomy will be far more expensive and the opportunities much more limited.
The SKA is already an enormously expensive project that took decades to create and is at the very edge of our signal processing capabilities even using the highest capacity fibre-optic data networks and supercomputers. Deploying the same type of array in space is decades away at current technology levels.
Then the world would likely get by just fine with ground based optic fibre to urban areas and along highways to remote area hubs with people in truly remote areas getting by just as they have done since homo sapians first banged rocks together.
and up until this point in time they were unable to navigate, to read news, to feed themselves?
There are billions of people in the world and no shortage of internet hot spots for those that need them.
Many people, myself included, grew up without internet connectivity and still managed somehow to get math degrees and write several million unique SLOC lines to backbone GIS, networking, crypto and the like.
Millions also got by without electricity before the grid was developed. It did not keep them from becoming great men. But it did keep them from technological progress and kept women chained to the household.
Starlink can provide direct LTE communication without the ground station, so technically, all mobile phone signal can be tracked, everyone's location on earth are traced by Starlink.
Germany also recently claims passive radar (SABBIA) using starlink signals to detect small drones, which has roughly RCS of stealth fighters. IIRC there were folks exploing starlink transimissions as bi/multistatic illumination source since 2020. Along similiar concept of using cell phone towers to detect stealth back in 2000s, which I haven't really see popsci junk publications talking since, which either means it's very fake, or imo, more likely very real. Chinese also explored similar in 2000s - Sparse-array synthetic impulse and aperture radar (SIAR) using multiple illuminators, seems pretty credible that megaconstellation is going to be illuminators going forward. Either way, no one expected VLS advantage to last forever, even in F117 days.
> can probably be used to de-stealth US stealth aircraft
As the subtitle says, the fact that Beijing would disclose this almost guarantees it's false. De-cloaking U.S. stealth fighters would be a singular game changer in the battles for Taiwan.
Not disclosing this only really benefits them if it's a viable means of detection and they expect to use it in anger one day.
(viable in the sense that it's no use if it only works when a stealth plane blocks line of sight between ground detector and satellite)
By disclosing it, they reduced confidence in the military of multiple adversaries in the public eye and potentially caused them to spend to money to investigate/fix.
Yeah, let's not get ahead of ourselves here. They've managed to do it with a drone, they haven't shown it's possible with stealth jets. It might be possible, it's not a "probably".
the solution is IMO , telescopes in space, even if starlink we to deploy newer better satellites the noise will be more because of the additive effect of the number of them which need to be in orbit. There is no viable way to go back. military , marine and aviation industry are adopting starlink type internet solutions on mass. Not to mention many countries have stated national security desire to have similar capability .
NO. A tax is a bad way to regulate any system in the long run. Ideally i would like all telescopes be shifted to outer space. if spacex or its competitor created a orbital satellite network and charged a monthly / yearly fee to get a feed of data from the cost / dollar would far exceed anything available today. tax going to govt is a place for inovation to die.
As these satellites become more and more important and have access to more data, can someone more informed than me comment on:
- How easy are they to hostile takeover by a nation state?
- Would in-flight in-place malicious modifications even be detectable easily? Curious if temporary cut-offs are the norm due to atmospheric interference and such.
Let me add one: What is the current international agreements or regulations (if any) on airspace (space space?) above a country's sea and land footprint? Anybody can fly over without clearance? As airspace is regulated, what's the boundary of these regulations? Thx!
The boundary follows the nautical border, beyond that is the air defense identification zone which is where the military warn planes to identify themselves before they reach the border. Generally speaking military planes (if we ignore geopolitics and focus purely on aviation) is only in technical violation if they cross the actual boundary, which when the vehicle becomes covered by the laws of the country which airspace they are in and thus can suffer kinetic countermeasures even in peacetime. The air defence zone is based more on politics rather than international/treaty legality which is why air forces constantly fly their vehicles up to the edge of adversary states to test response times. Don't try that as a civilian.
On a side note, ignore sensationalized media reporting about air forces violating air spaces. This is something every air force worth their salt does. It's only a real enforceable violation if they are past the border and in aviation altitudes (see my explanation below about spy planes) e.g. the balloon incident which was genuinely weird.
Above the Karman line it's no longer considered aviation and is generally governed more by international treaties and geopolitics (that are distinct and separate from civilian/general aviation regulations). Generally you can do whatever the fuck you want in space so long as you are not putting up kinetic weapons, creating lots of debris, or interfering with the trajectories of other countries' satellites. It's very much a wild west and the further you go the wilder it gets. That's why there's a concerted effort to replace the Outer Space Treaty (see the policy side of the Artemis Project for example) when it comes to space colonization (current laws aren't compatible with colonization, exercise for the reader to find out why). Generally speaking when you get high enough, the number of countries that has the capabilities to deny you airspace access can be counted on two hands, mostly the Security Council states and similarly advanced countries. There's a fuzzy area around the Karman line where it's generally too high for most conventional missiles to reach which is where the interesting spy plane missions get flown (and partially why countries like to build the space shuttle style space skimming vehicles). Laws only apply when you can enforce it, and anything space related gets expensive real fast. Even North Korea doesn't shake the boat too much when it comes to putting things into space.
Everything always does, but with a cheap battery from Lowes I now have Internet everywhere I go for $60/month beamed to me from space. I'm good with it.
Not everything behaves 30 times worse in some (important) metric than the previous model. "T'is how it is" is a very low effort way of justifying anything.
> I'm good with it.
As is usually the case when the benefits are yours and the inconvenience (or more) is someone else's. Think just how many people are good with the downsides of having plentiful, cheap oil for example. Says nothing about the issue but speaks volumes about the person.
Too bad someone can't just use a Flipper Zero to turn off Starlink satellites if they're distracting [0].
A very well encapsulated display of "fuck you, I got mine".
Of course you are good with it, hopefully whatever you do with Internet everywhere you go is more important, and impactful than what radio astronomers could do without the radio pollution.
Astronomers don’t own frequency exclusively. I think we’ll be fine. Same as we were fine with every other thing that seemed like it was going to destroy the world.
Some things don't need ownership to be treated with respect. Animals in the jungle are not owned exclusively by anyone but we still want to collectively protect them.
One can try to be a good neighbour and mindful of others sharing that space (in this case, radio frequencies coming from out of Earth), or one can be an asshole and say "no one owns this, I can do whatever I want".
> I think we’ll be fine. Same as we were fine with every other thing that seemed like it was going to destroy the world.
You can't know what will be missed, it's not about "will destroy the world", it's getting noisier, we will miss signals in those frequency ranges, and for what? So you and some others can travel around connecting to the Internet and posting on Hacker News? I don't think that improves our understanding of the cosmos, while the work of the people being impacted by the radio noise actually does improve our understanding of the fucking Universe.
I think it's quite clear what is more important for humanity... But assholes don't care about that, they launch some satellites to make some money, damned be others in their way.
The people won't have any understanding at all if they can't access Wikipedia. At this point radio astronomy has got to be hitting the long tail of scientific achievement. Unless someone can demonstrate otherwise, I'd be more concerned about the careers of the people still doing it rather than humanity's ability to understand the universe. The stars ain't going to change. Maybe you'll miss a few supernovas. If I were a radio astronomer I'd actually be rejoicing now, because this gives me a legitimate need for the budget required to build my own Hubble-like telescope, far away from Starlink.
That's the thing, the vast majority of people paying for Starlink's service could already access Wikipedia, Starlink is not democratising internet access in places where people never had access before, as much as that is their PR selling point.
The amount of people actually getting to access Wikipedia reliably for the first time because of Starlink is a tiny, tiny fraction of all users.
The pure hubris of not even communicating with the scientific community to tackle potential obstacles that could hinder their exploration is what's absolutely wrong, just a one-sided decision to fuck it up because they can.
> The stars ain't going to change. Maybe you'll miss a few supernovas. If I were a radio astronomer I'd actually be rejoicing now, because this gives me a legitimate need for the budget required to build my own Hubble-like telescope, far away from Starlink.
Oh, that's great, go tell that to the PhDs in radio astronomy right now that might be getting fucked in their observations while on a time crunch to get their doctorate because someone decided to turn on GHz radios in space that mess with their instruments developed through the research of thousands before them.
Also tell us the taxpayers that investment in our expensive radio astronomy equipment on Earth is getting less useful because one company decided they can fuck with the spectrum they've been developed to listen to, I'm sure that the observatories on this list [0] don't really care and now are tingling with joy because they can spend even more public money to build radio telescopes but in space™.
Have you ever tried to get grants to build instruments that cost 9 figures dollars, and a decade or more to be finished?
You don't own a restaurant or its TV exclusively and yet with your own words you'd forcefully turn such a TV off if it's distracting (to you) [0]. It's never about who owns what, it's about what you want at anyone else's expense.
Astronomers don't have any control over the frequencies of light emitted by the stuff they're looking at, and they could previously rely on radio-quiet locations existing somehere on planet Earth.
> Same as we were fine with every other thing that seemed like it was going to destroy the world.
We might be, or not. Anthropic bias: we can only observe the dice rolls that don't kill us.
For all we know, attitudes like yours are the solution to the Fermi paradox.
But this isn't about "will destroy us", this is about "is this interference even necessary?" and "do your personal benefits outweigh the harms to others?"
If I were in charge of the would I would say "let's put the telescopes in space" — but as I'm not, that's promising jam tomorrow to someone who wants food today.
For all we know, the solution to Fermi paradox are people who insist on tradition and not upsetting the status quo instead of taking advantage of the possibilities of truly global high speed internet coverage for low prices.
I agree this should be fixed if it's possible. But if it meant 2x the price of the subscription, I'm pretty fine with them keeping it as it is. Global internet is just way too good for humanity to not do it.
I'm not suggesting we don't want or benefit from high speed internet, I'm saying there's other ways of getting the same result, alternatives which don't mess with fundamental science for however long it takes to get around to building replacement radio telescopes in space.
And I'm saying this as someone who was seriously considering getting a Starlink connection (wired internet turned out to be good as well as cheap, but I was seriously considering Starlink).
> But if it meant 2x the price of the subscription, I'm pretty fine with them keeping it as it is.
If it was just about prices and nothing else, I'd be promoting the construction of an orbital ring launch system, which would inherently double as a global power grid and be a good place to mount PV.
Cheap space access (cheap enough to be used as a global 90-minute railway even if you have to go the long way around), cheap power supply (no clouds and less sun blocked by the air), cheap power transmission (because it's cross-subsidised with the other two).
> Global internet is just way too good for humanity to not do it.
Ah man you should go out and see the night sky sometimes. I have, all my life, and it’s great. You’ll see meteors and the satellites and the ISS. It’s fantastic. Seeing the satellites makes kids wild. If this is piss, then call me P Diddy.
This is broadband 10-88 MHz. The Starlink bands are somewhere between 10–86 GHz. They are jamming almost an order of magnitude of scientifically highly valuable spectrum for no reason at all. It is outsourcing EMI testing of their satellites to LOFAR at this point.
let's see if this Starlink thread will go were the others went, with HN commenters suggesting all astronomy moves to space because having Internet everywhere you go is too important
How are you getting internet anywhere? Is there a Starlink roaming or cell service that is available? I don't know too much about their offerings besides home internet.
Unless another government chooses to nationalise fibre installations on a permanent and on-going basis (outside metro areas) we’ll continue being scalped in perpetuity.
The private sector in Australia has repeatedly failed to deliver even somewhat competitive prices in a number of key sectors. With a population <10% that of the USA, we do not have enough people for the private sector to not end up in a monopoly or duopoly.
Markets work really well when they incentivise competition but Australia has unique geographical and demographic factors which do not facilitate that incentivisation to sustain itself.
Oh, I would still have to carry that big old device. I thought it would just be a connection from my phone to some roaming network. On a sidenote, does StarLink allow me to move around with with this device and have people pay to connect? Can i make a business out of my device to provide a hotspot at people's events and stuff?
Or they have the same rules for like Tesla chargers where you can't ask for a fee.
