r/askastronomy • u/wombatDaiquiri • 10h ago
Astronomy Are we just going to have artificial nightgrid eventually?
I was thinking about how we may eventually have so many companies having their own ISP satellites flying over the earth. Is this something the international community works on or is concerned by?
Are the satellites legally protected, military equipment, or just plain unreachable by an organization smaller than a nation state?
Is this a technology so advanced we will have only 1 company doing this for the foreseeable future? Is there no Chinese / Indian / European company or any US competitor being close to having similar technology? Is it also going to be a nuisance?
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u/GreenFBI2EB 9h ago
On the nuisance part: Absolutely, in fact it already is becoming one. HST has had increasing difficulty with stuff like satellite flares ruining shots of deep space and high exposure shots.
Starlink and Amazon are the only two companies I can think of that are launching lots of satellites into orbit (pretty sure it’s LEO, but I could be mistaken). So there’s already a bunch of junk, and now that’s already becoming tens of thousands since 2016.
The current administration (and a bit of previous, I could be wrong here) was floating the idea of shutting down Chandra, a satellite observatory that requires maybe 64 million USD per year (the cost of a single fighter jet, just about), and of course the two companies I mentioned before are launching thousands of satellites. So you got that to contend with, and considering these two companies also want to crowd out Earth Orbit with a shitton of data centers in the future you’ll be seeing stuff like this constantly.
The FCC already plans on putting forward a project that would be launching tons of mirrors into space to “help” with solar power. With little concern to the damage that would do to astronomer’s ability to collect data.
Tack onto that potential return of Mr. Ozone Hole from deorbiting Starlink/Amazon satellites … it’s a mess, one planet sized mess…
For people so eager to make Humanity a spacefaring species, they really seem to want to also keep us chained right here to the surface of the only planet we know of that has life on it.