Motten, I recently read that there are problems with undersea contamination of the Baltic sea by stockpiles of nerve gas and chemical warfare agents *that were dumped in the ocean* after World War II. The canisters are now corroded and leaking and parts of the water column are heavily contaminated, and sometimes one of those canisters comes up in a fisherman's net and creates a hazardous waste problem of epic proportion.
Half a million satellites might sound like a lot but if you calculate the surface area of LEO it is around 573 million square kilometers so you're talking about a single satellite for every 1000 square Km... and that assume's they're all at the same altitude. If we assume that the area of a single LEO satellite is around 10 square meters then we're talking about a density of 10^-11, again, assuming everything is at exactly the same altitude -- which it's not. The odds therefore, of hitting one as you transit through LEO into higher orbits or beyond is still VERY low. What people often forget is that "space is a reakkt big place" and this applies even to the partof space that constitutes a "low earth orbit". Someone else can do the 3D calcs to work out the density if we factor in the several hundred miles vertical spacings involved but this will be many orders of magnitude lower than the 10^-11 figure for assuming a 2D environment.
I've been saying this for about 5 years. By the time we get a manned moon mission ready, we won't be abls to leave the planet due to all the crap surrounding it.
I am 66 years old and I'm glad I will not be here when the troubles that are being produced (not only satellites but also global warming, toxic overload etc) will really hit us. I feel sorry for my granddaughters who are currently 7 and 9 and who will suffer the consequences with out being able to do a sodding thing to stop it.
How much thought was given? Absolutely none other than how much money could be made. I wonder if the Hubble deep-field photo that was made years ago that showed how many galaxies existed in a seemingly empty spot of sky could even be made today. It required about one week of exposure.
The last NASA servicing mission was in 2009, so it has some equipment onboard that is around 15 years old, but other parts are much older. It would be great to send another servicing mission to boost the orbit. Maybe SpaceX could be a big part of that.
No. It was a mistake to let people like Musk profit off the research and testing the public paid for. Letting him profit off fixing his fu(k ups would add insult to injury
If people weren't obsessed with measuring their gps-tracked, healthy activities steps, perhaps things wouldn't be that bad. Funny thing is, most of these steps are between sofas and fridges. Vanity of individuals will end us all.
Here’s what I don’t comprehend…With all of the experience and mathematical calculations that go into putting vehicles and satellites in orbit, they can’t have or know how to keep the sats out of the way of Hubble or vice versa ?
Ironically, we're watching this video delivered over Starlink...otherwise we would have no internet in our rural location. "It's Complicated". Waiting for the litter pickup space program.
Anyone remember Arthur C. Clarke's estimation that a 1,000 foot antenna in geostationary orbit would suffice to "hear" a watch-borne radio? Gosh, those were the days, huh? Okay, now who said, "Sure, okay!": to Elon?
It is important to understand that the INTENT was for ALL of the large LEO satellite constellations to be BELOW Hubble. But Hubble has lasted FAR longer than expected, and as a result, its orbit has gradually decayed 30 kilometers BELOW its intended orbital altitude! Hubble either needs a reboost (recommended to at least 600 km), or needs to be retired. Right now, Hubble is a slowly dying mission.
All sats are probably required to register with navigation systems like planes are and it will be possible to monitor their routes, plan flights etc, but it's definitely a risk factor and an additional layer of complexity on top of everything else.
We have three active satellites in orbit now, and I can tell you that VERY MUCH thought has been put into this. The procedure to get something up there is exhaustively hard, because every aspect (at least every we can think of) is taken into account. You have to meet and prove tons of requirements. It takes forever. And as you would guess, human spaceflight is of course one of the aspects. Release mechanisms don´t just randomly expl0de cr4p like cables or paint into space. Trackability is the main issue, so there is extremely much attention put into this. We had a launch scrubbed because they couldn´t make sure that our satellites´ trajectories would be available at the time of a manned launch - even if the risk of beeing hit by a new satellite is basically zero. Same for reentry. Every single thing that might cause a risk has to be modelled, simulated and evaluated. I agree that not every country might follow the rules as they should - there is definitely a lot to improve. But I´m not worried as long as stuff like Starlink stays in LEO 😀. Sure, more satellites provide a higher uncontrollable risk than less of them, but it´s still not like in the "Wild West", and definitely no one is handwaving them thoughtlessly into orbit.
When launched in 1990, Hubble was only intended to last until 2005, but now is expected to be in service much longer due to successful servicing, which probably explains why it is in such a low orbit - no-one expected the enormous increase in private sattelite clustersin higher orbits or for Hubble to be around for more than 15 years in the first place. Unfortunately, Hubble has no thrusters and can't be moved further out directly, even if that would help. Although their may be hundreds of thousands of sattelites planned, they will all be well tracked, and at that distance they will not be particularly close together, so they are not the problem. The problem is all the debris that is too small to be tracked, as Fran points out. Maybe we need a "space hoover" to collect it all up, although I seem to recall a science fiction story that had that premise and it didn't end well, just wish I could remember the title!
Well, there is the anime series Planetes which is a surreal set of stories with space janitors ( Not Roger Wilco ) as the heroes of the series. It starts with a space liner ( with people onboard ) that is is destroyed by a collision with a single stray bolt. One problem with collisions is that debris hitting other debris will cause a cloud of smaller debris particles that can still cause damage if they have enough momentum relative to the object they collide with.
Maybe this will chase us out of LEO and on to the Lagrange points. I think Wall-E gave us a preview of what a crowded LEO might work like. Basically, the bigger stuff just knocks the smaller stuff out of the way, I guess. The new James Webb telescope has an ideal location to avoid all the low Earth orbital traffic.
Before long, all those satellites will constitute a "Shield wall !!" that will prevent our arrows.....err, our rocket ships, from reaching Valhalla....err, their intended targets.
It would indeed be an opportunity to engage in some pleasurable schadenfreude at the irony of a Starlink satellite causing the damage or destruction of one of Musk's Starship vehicles (best an unpersoned one tho').
The space debris is definitely a huge problem.. I wonder whether communicating by bouncing stuff off the ionosphere will get better or worse? I am thinking of like project west ford, the big 1960's project of dumping a bunch of tiny needles into orbit around the earth to create an artificial ring.
I would suggest that people get out to see dark skies (we have many "Starcamps" in the UK) before it's too late and then in 2030 all you will see through binoculars is a mass of satellites.
I understand the problem. But, as a rural resident (I don’t have Starlink), you have little idea how difficult it is to live life now with limited internet and cell phone coverage. That’s before you even get into the economic growth impacts. My internet speed is 10Mbps. I’m lucky that I’ve got los to a WISP, most people in my area don’t. Many government services mandate you use the internet to respond to jury duty, tax payments, etc. If you cannot get something at Walmart you order online. OTA TV signals have disappeared due to FCC selling spectrum to mobile companies (that don’t redeploy in our area). Even the boondoggle of internet infrastructure spending appears to be franchised and deployment is along the most populated areas. Perhaps we need to reevaluate how we want to live. Light pollution has been and continues to be an issue for life in general. I’m sure most people will want to use blackout curtains and remove streetlights in Philly.
These days The things that are almost impossible to do without good Internet access include apply for a job, apply for a loan, apply for unemployment, find a car to buy, adopt a dog, buy something via mail order, communicate with your doctor or make a medical appointment, or perhaps even just to make a haircut appointment.
The celestial scatstorm is coming. We're like the 18th century humans who 'invented' sewers and dumped raw waste into the rivers folks downstream used for drinking water. We'll eventually learn (🤞) but not before much (unnecessary) pain.
Let alone trying to do work with the large synoptic survey.. I’m not opposed to satellite constellations but at the same time I am opposed to them.. lol not to mention how reckless a lot of companies here, and in other countries are with what they are doing, they really need to deal with the space debris, cleanup.. you know know… Like yesterday..
" You made a killing dealing in real estate at NASA/ selling cemetery plots in outer space/until some falling coffins crashed upon your doorstep/ Welcome To the Human Race..." Timbuk3
Excuse my ignorance, but if this becomes such a problem that Hubble could not operate, would there be no way to adjust it's altitude beyond that of the telecommunication satellites?
There's going to have to be some very serious regulations put in place for this problem to be kept under control. One idea may be the return to larger satellites that can be a joint ventures of multiple companies, and have all the electronics of several smaller satellites on board. The next thing can be an improvement of ground based communication systems instead on launching more satellites. Come to think of it, it doesn't look like humans are going anywhere outside the planet Earth any time soon, at least not in large numbers. So I guess the current mind set is "We're going to deal with that problem whenever we get to it."
Half the problem is that LEO is currently no-mans-land, there's pretty much zero regulation. "Space" (I forget the strict definition but "space" starts some distance outside the atmosphere) and the Atmosphere are covered by various international treaties but there's nothing that covers the interstitial space.
Some industrious start up could put manned habitats in orbit, to replace all the private satellites that all do the exact same things... You just need a few manned upgradable sensor habitats to cover the sky rather than thousands of single function single company satellites. I'm not saying the sensor habitats will replace ALL satellites: maybe a couple thousand.
Watching this using starlink now! I'm happy I've got internet compared to amature astronomers. I'll die on this block of dirt we live on, doubt us humans would travel to other planets in my lifetime.
Hubble is sadly on borrowed time at this point just due to its age. JWST is out a million miles or so and only bothered by a passing micro meteorite. All the garbage flying around up there will be troubling and its just a matter of time before it causes something bad to happen.
431,000 satellites? Jeebus! When I was born in 1963, the number of orbiting satellites could be counted on one hand. We truly are standing on the shoulders of giants. My mother, who worked as a mathematician at AC Sparkplug in Oak Creek, WI, under contract from NASA to produce an inertial guidance system, used to wake us up at night, and keep us home from school to watch NASA's live feed of their space missions on our black and white television. As I type this, Elon Musk has turned what used to be a nearly impossible feat, into a routine affair.
Hmmm, is there an upside that if we put enough satellites into orbit we can shield the Earth from enough Sunlight that we solve the climate crisis??? (Really, I'm just kidding, but I do wonder...)
Take a look at how many airplanes are in the air at any given moment. And then compare to the percentage of mid-air collisions. Not many people consider that air and space is much larger than two-dimensional land.
Planes are maneuverable, piloted, and kept apart by air traffic control, yet collisions of aircraft still happen. And there are never half a million planes in the air all at once. No comparison to satellites.
I hate to say it, but I think we are overdue for a collision in LEO, I just hope it does not involve any craft occupied by people. And the more satellites we put up there, the more chance of any collision leading to a snowball effect, leaving large areas of low earth orbit no go areas. Must be quite a task keeping track of everything we now have up there, working out all of the orbits, calculating weeks in advance if anything needs to move over a bit to avoid a collision. I know the ISS needs to move from time to time in order to avoid risks of collision. And what about all the unknowns, like asteroids and bits of space junk discarded decades ago? It was only a few years ago that one of the upper stages from a Saturn V came by for a visit - something that NASA kicked out into space decades ago. One of these unknowns could cause quite a problem.
But Fran, Elon Musk is such a considerate and well-reasoned individual! _Surely_ he would have thought through every ramification of everything he does. /s
Eventually they will be so dense as to need to reflect or emanate colors back to the ground keep the sky looking uncrowded. Later they will be dense enough to form pixel patterns - at first for fun, then for sale with special locked access for your own patch of the sky to look the way you choose, weather permitting. The poor people will have to look at something unattractive of course.
Well it was a bit of a task finding you on you tube, the last time I watched was before I understood the importance of subscribing and thought the amalgorythme would bring me back? Your vid on a b bender guitar is what originally brought me here ! Now I am here to see a better out look on society as a whole ,I feel you seem to give hope to your species ? ha ha ! Now as far as your video shows, I am sure the way we [ our leaders?] are so war minded ,I am sure when we are capable of flying around in space we will be able to disintegrate any thing in our path? Any how glad to reconnect with your channel again and happy you are ok as I started to think some thing bad may have happened? Remember what the big print givith the fine print taketh away ? lol : and a little more guitar would B nice? .Thanks Fran!
Unfortunately musk does not care about anything that doesn't make him money or boost his ego right now. He doesn't put a lot of thought into whether he will create problems for other people (or even himself) because no one in his life (except those on twitter, which he now seized control of) is willing to criticise him for mistakes or wrongdoing.
Just FYI, 400,000 satellites is about one per 500 square miles. If say they were all compressed into a thin layer at the same altitude and the combined cross sectional area of a satellite and a rocket passing through this layer was 100 square yards then the chance of a collision is about one in 12 million. The Hubble situation doesn't seem to be much of a problem, just put the next generation of space telescopes in a higher orbit than the networks.
Ironically this is worse for professional telescopes than amateur astrophotographers. Airplane and satellite removal is basically baked into the stacking software we use. If a subframe has an airplane going through it, I just leave it. I remove the subframes with clouds, but not with satellites. But for professional telescopes, every second of imaging time is precious. They can't afford to just throw away data like I can.
I'm not sure how StarLink can be of much use as a "last mile" provider except for rural areas and remote regions. How many users are we actually talking about? You can build 250 (300ft) towers for every launch that is completed (including all communications equipment), with towers lasting between 30-50 years. Dotting the landscape with towers would appear to make more sense (using RF point-to-point mesh system - as is basically already being done). I don't really see any advantages to such a system with
It is frightening how accurate the movie Wall-E is turning out to be. Great video as always Fran!
Forget the problems we're creating now and deal with the fall-out later... that's humanity. 👍
Thanks Fran, interesting topic. 🙂
That's Elon. His indifference to the problems he creates is disgusting.
@@ChrisB..., Musk is now trying to take a page from an Ayn Rand novel by building his own town in Texas.
Motten, I recently read that there are problems with undersea contamination of the Baltic sea by stockpiles of nerve gas and chemical warfare agents *that were dumped in the ocean* after World War II. The canisters are now corroded and leaking and parts of the water column are heavily contaminated, and sometimes one of those canisters comes up in a fisherman's net and creates a hazardous waste problem of epic proportion.
Anyone remember the planet Krikkit from _HHGTTG?_ No night sky thanks to a pulverized megastructure stuck in its gravity well.
Yes, at the time I thought it was funny but now it's not so strange.
You know how hard it is to explain that planet to layfolk that have never read the Guide? Omg, easy on paper is impossible irl
Half a million satellites might sound like a lot but if you calculate the surface area of LEO it is around 573 million square kilometers so you're talking about a single satellite for every 1000 square Km... and that assume's they're all at the same altitude.
If we assume that the area of a single LEO satellite is around 10 square meters then we're talking about a density of 10^-11, again, assuming everything is at exactly the same altitude -- which it's not.
The odds therefore, of hitting one as you transit through LEO into higher orbits or beyond is still VERY low.
What people often forget is that "space is a reakkt big place" and this applies even to the partof space that constitutes a "low earth orbit".
Someone else can do the 3D calcs to work out the density if we factor in the several hundred miles vertical spacings involved but this will be many orders of magnitude lower than the 10^-11 figure for assuming a 2D environment.
That's exactly what I was thinking. "Space" is aptly named.
I've been saying this for about 5 years. By the time we get a manned moon mission ready, we won't be abls to leave the planet due to all the crap surrounding it.
I am 66 years old and I'm glad I will not be here when the troubles that are being produced (not only satellites but also global warming, toxic overload etc) will really hit us. I feel sorry for my granddaughters who are currently 7 and 9 and who will suffer the consequences with out being able to do a sodding thing to stop it.
Wow, talk about cross-town traffic!
That newspaper in the beginning was pure asmr lol
Yet another Frant (!), where I sit on my couch with a 21:9 smile on my face - thanks alot! 🙂
i think it's time to invest in steel enforced umbrellas business, Max Headroom style...
There is a scene in Wal-E where the space probe crashes through a cloud of satellites so there you go, just bash through it on the way to Mars
Pixar was right about many things in that movie.
Yep. Where I’m at in New Mexico it’s normally clear, but for the past three years, it’s been cloudy most the time, and when it isn’t satellites😢
How much thought was given? Absolutely none other than how much money could be made. I wonder if the Hubble deep-field photo that was made years ago that showed how many galaxies existed in a seemingly empty spot of sky could even be made today. It required about one week of exposure.
The last NASA servicing mission was in 2009, so it has some equipment onboard that is around 15 years old, but other parts are much older. It would be great to send another servicing mission to boost the orbit. Maybe SpaceX could be a big part of that.
No. It was a mistake to let people like Musk profit off the research and testing the public paid for. Letting him profit off fixing his fu(k ups would add insult to injury
If people weren't obsessed with measuring their gps-tracked, healthy activities steps, perhaps things wouldn't be that bad.
Funny thing is, most of these steps are between sofas and fridges.
Vanity of individuals will end us all.
The individuals whose vanity that will be our undoing are billionaires like Musk and Bezos
This is an institutional problem allowed to come about due to lack of legislation.
Hubble always had a limited life span. I guess we'll put the next one in a higher orbit? I dunno.
Everything has a limited life span, this is why they don't think about the future :-P I dunno either
Here’s what I don’t comprehend…With all of the experience and mathematical calculations that go into putting vehicles and satellites in orbit, they can’t have or know how to keep the sats out of the way of Hubble or vice versa ?
They don't think further than the spreadsheets in front of them.
Great, we have filled almost all the landfills, so let's create lots of spacefills.
Ironically, we're watching this video delivered over Starlink...otherwise we would have no internet in our rural location. "It's Complicated". Waiting for the litter pickup space program.
Humans. The litterers of Earth… and space!
Love your hat Fran! You’ve got style.
What goes up must come down.
Anyone remember Arthur C. Clarke's estimation that a 1,000 foot antenna in geostationary orbit would suffice to "hear" a watch-borne radio? Gosh, those were the days, huh? Okay, now who said, "Sure, okay!": to Elon?
It is important to understand that the INTENT was for ALL of the large LEO satellite constellations to be BELOW Hubble. But Hubble has lasted FAR longer than expected, and as a result, its orbit has gradually decayed 30 kilometers BELOW its intended orbital altitude!
Hubble either needs a reboost (recommended to at least 600 km), or needs to be retired. Right now, Hubble is a slowly dying mission.
All sats are probably required to register with navigation systems like planes are and it will be possible to monitor their routes, plan flights etc, but it's definitely a risk factor and an additional layer of complexity on top of everything else.
Interesting. A big fan of your content. In 1978, the Kessler syndrome was proposed by Donald Kessler. In 1991, he published collisional cascading.
We have three active satellites in orbit now, and I can tell you that VERY MUCH thought has been put into this.
The procedure to get something up there is exhaustively hard, because every aspect (at least every we can think of) is taken into account. You have to meet and prove tons of requirements. It takes forever. And as you would guess, human spaceflight is of course one of the aspects. Release mechanisms don´t just randomly expl0de cr4p like cables or paint into space.
Trackability is the main issue, so there is extremely much attention put into this. We had a launch scrubbed because they couldn´t make sure that our satellites´ trajectories would be available at the time of a manned launch - even if the risk of beeing hit by a new satellite is basically zero. Same for reentry. Every single thing that might cause a risk has to be modelled, simulated and evaluated. I agree that not every country might follow the rules as they should - there is definitely a lot to improve. But I´m not worried as long as stuff like Starlink stays in LEO 😀.
Sure, more satellites provide a higher uncontrollable risk than less of them, but it´s still not like in the "Wild West", and definitely no one is handwaving them thoughtlessly into orbit.
When launched in 1990, Hubble was only intended to last until 2005, but now is expected to be in service much longer due to successful servicing, which probably explains why it is in such a low orbit - no-one expected the enormous increase in private sattelite clustersin higher orbits or for Hubble to be around for more than 15 years in the first place. Unfortunately, Hubble has no thrusters and can't be moved further out directly, even if that would help.
Although their may be hundreds of thousands of sattelites planned, they will all be well tracked, and at that distance they will not be particularly close together, so they are not the problem. The problem is all the debris that is too small to be tracked, as Fran points out. Maybe we need a "space hoover" to collect it all up, although I seem to recall a science fiction story that had that premise and it didn't end well, just wish I could remember the title!
Well, there is the anime series Planetes which is a surreal set of stories with space janitors ( Not Roger Wilco ) as the heroes of the series. It starts with a space liner ( with people onboard ) that is is destroyed by a collision with a single stray bolt. One problem with collisions is that debris hitting other debris will cause a cloud of smaller debris particles that can still cause damage if they have enough momentum relative to the object they collide with.
Move the damn telescope.
Service, re-feul, upgrade, AND move the telescope...
Kessler is laughing his arse off.
Maybe this will chase us out of LEO and on to the Lagrange points.
I think Wall-E gave us a preview of what a crowded LEO might work like. Basically, the bigger stuff just knocks the smaller stuff out of the way, I guess.
The new James Webb telescope has an ideal location to avoid all the low Earth orbital traffic.
It is already here. Bluetooth is it's own network and it is everywhere.
I'm reminded of an oft-repeated phrase from the Ballad of Serenity. "...you can't take the sky from me."
Apparently... they can.
Before long, all those satellites will constitute a "Shield wall !!" that will prevent our arrows.....err, our rocket ships, from reaching Valhalla....err, their intended targets.
It would indeed be an opportunity to engage in some pleasurable schadenfreude at the irony of a Starlink satellite causing the damage or destruction of one of Musk's Starship vehicles (best an unpersoned one tho').
Just think of a big solar flare with an EMP.....
The sky is falling!
I JUST FOUND T H E COOLEST CHANNEL ON YT - thank you, fran
Night sky will be plaid
The Kessler effect... coming to an orbit near you !!!
The space debris is definitely a huge problem.. I wonder whether communicating by bouncing stuff off the ionosphere will get better or worse? I am thinking of like project west ford, the big 1960's project of dumping a bunch of tiny needles into orbit around the earth to create an artificial ring.
I would suggest that people get out to see dark skies (we have many "Starcamps" in the UK) before it's too late and then in 2030 all you will see through binoculars is a mass of satellites.
I understand the problem. But, as a rural resident (I don’t have Starlink), you have little idea how difficult it is to live life now with limited internet and cell phone coverage. That’s before you even get into the economic growth impacts. My internet speed is 10Mbps. I’m lucky that I’ve got los to a WISP, most people in my area don’t. Many government services mandate you use the internet to respond to jury duty, tax payments, etc. If you cannot get something at Walmart you order online. OTA TV signals have disappeared due to FCC selling spectrum to mobile companies (that don’t redeploy in our area). Even the boondoggle of internet infrastructure spending appears to be franchised and deployment is along the most populated areas. Perhaps we need to reevaluate how we want to live. Light pollution has been and continues to be an issue for life in general. I’m sure most people will want to use blackout curtains and remove streetlights in Philly.
These days The things that are almost impossible to do without good Internet access include apply for a job, apply for a loan, apply for unemployment, find a car to buy, adopt a dog, buy something via mail order, communicate with your doctor or make a medical appointment, or perhaps even just to make a haircut appointment.
it will be pretty bad is NASA has to "photoshop" satellites out of their pictures.
Anyone remember the cult classic tv movie "Smash Up on Interstate 5"? (Hint- Buddy Ebsen was one of the stars) Time to make "Smash Up on Interspace 5"
"sky" "net" I get it~!
Yeah, the combination of sky-shell AND missions outside orbit seems like something from doctor strangelove
Freeman Dyson and James Dyson should team up to clean this mess up.
I love you and your vids,first found you when ufo report came out. Keep on keeping on fran!
I'm sorry about that Fran there is some plan to clean it up with starship
Looks like the number of satellites depicted in the movie Wall-E was a tad bit conservative.
The celestial scatstorm is coming. We're like the 18th century humans who 'invented' sewers and dumped raw waste into the rivers folks downstream used for drinking water. We'll eventually learn (🤞) but not before much (unnecessary) pain.
The shrapnelsphere: A new layer between the thermosphere and outer space will be created. Cross it at your own risk!
Part of the problem is that space is under nobody's authority or ownership, it's a free for all.
"Space" is regulated by various international treaties, LEO is not.
It will be like a Faraday Cage around Earth.
WOW! Is that a newspaper?
Let alone trying to do work with the large synoptic survey.. I’m not opposed to satellite constellations but at the same time I am opposed to them.. lol
not to mention how reckless a lot of companies here, and in other countries are with what they are doing, they really need to deal with the space debris, cleanup.. you know know… Like yesterday..
I suspect thought was given to all the sky junk, but the decision was to just go ahead, anyway...
" You made a killing dealing in real estate at NASA/ selling cemetery plots in outer space/until some falling coffins crashed upon your doorstep/ Welcome To the Human Race..." Timbuk3
Excuse my ignorance, but if this becomes such a problem that Hubble could not operate, would there be no way to adjust it's altitude beyond that of the telecommunication satellites?
It's been in space for 33 years. It's planned to cease operating between 2030 and 2040.
There's going to have to be some very serious regulations put in place for this problem to be kept under control. One idea may be the return to larger satellites that can be a joint ventures of multiple companies, and have all the electronics of several smaller satellites on board. The next thing can be an improvement of ground based communication systems instead on launching more satellites.
Come to think of it, it doesn't look like humans are going anywhere outside the planet Earth any time soon, at least not in large numbers. So I guess the current mind set is "We're going to deal with that problem whenever we get to it."
Half the problem is that LEO is currently no-mans-land, there's pretty much zero regulation. "Space" (I forget the strict definition but "space" starts some distance outside the atmosphere) and the Atmosphere are covered by various international treaties but there's nothing that covers the interstitial space.
Some industrious start up could put manned habitats in orbit, to replace all the private satellites that all do the exact same things... You just need a few manned upgradable sensor habitats to cover the sky rather than thousands of single function single company satellites. I'm not saying the sensor habitats will replace ALL satellites: maybe a couple thousand.
Near Earth orbit, if Fran is correct is rapidly becoming a micrometeorite storm that would make manned platforms very risky.
@@herbertshallcross9775 Kessler Syndrome is the name. Disposing of orbital debris is the game!
We can make a programme that removes debris. Especially if you have more than one image.
Watching this using starlink now! I'm happy I've got internet compared to amature astronomers. I'll die on this block of dirt we live on, doubt us humans would travel to other planets in my lifetime.
Their already doing it with Space Force. They just don't tell us.
Hubble is sadly on borrowed time at this point just due to its age. JWST is out a million miles or so and only bothered by a passing micro meteorite. All the garbage flying around up there will be troubling and its just a matter of time before it causes something bad to happen.
I called a company that makes pizza today. They brought me a pizza. Still blows me away.
431,000 satellites? Jeebus! When I was born in 1963, the number of orbiting satellites could be counted on one hand. We truly are standing on the shoulders of giants. My mother, who worked as a mathematician at AC Sparkplug in Oak Creek, WI, under contract from NASA to produce an inertial guidance system, used to wake us up at night, and keep us home from school to watch NASA's live feed of their space missions on our black and white television. As I type this, Elon Musk has turned what used to be a nearly impossible feat, into a routine affair.
It will always be "somebody else's problem".
Now we can't leave, that was the goal. The aliens have us sitting now😅
Thanks for another fun frant
I guess all those Sci Fi movies about space junk scavengers was just foreshadowing.
Junk zapper lasers, mounted on the nose of the space ship like those deer whistles!
Space is big. Even with 500,000 satellites, they'll have 1,206 sq kilometers of space each.
Hmmm, is there an upside that if we put enough satellites into orbit we can shield the Earth from enough Sunlight that we solve the climate crisis??? (Really, I'm just kidding, but I do wonder...)
How much thought did these people, any people, give to the consequences of these actions answer none or enough to do it anyway
Take a look at how many airplanes are in the air at any given moment.
And then compare to the percentage of mid-air collisions.
Not many people consider that air and space is much larger than two-dimensional land.
Planes are maneuverable, piloted, and kept apart by air traffic control, yet collisions of aircraft still happen. And there are never half a million planes in the air all at once. No comparison to satellites.
The answer to the Fermi Paradox. We are now a prison planet.
We're going to need to transition to fully reuseable launch vehicles similar to what Rocket Lab is doing.
will all of the space junk eventually whip itself into a homogenous haze? yes.
on a human timescale? nooo
I hate to say it, but I think we are overdue for a collision in LEO, I just hope it does not involve any craft occupied by people. And the more satellites we put up there, the more chance of any collision leading to a snowball effect, leaving large areas of low earth orbit no go areas. Must be quite a task keeping track of everything we now have up there, working out all of the orbits, calculating weeks in advance if anything needs to move over a bit to avoid a collision. I know the ISS needs to move from time to time in order to avoid risks of collision. And what about all the unknowns, like asteroids and bits of space junk discarded decades ago? It was only a few years ago that one of the upper stages from a Saturn V came by for a visit - something that NASA kicked out into space decades ago. One of these unknowns could cause quite a problem.
But Fran, Elon Musk is such a considerate and well-reasoned individual! _Surely_ he would have thought through every ramification of everything he does. /s
How do present rockets plan a route through all the junk? Or do they just spin the wheel and see what happens?
They know where they all are, but as Fran pointed out it's the other junk that might present a bigger problem.
Eventually they will be so dense as to need to reflect or emanate colors back to the ground keep the sky looking uncrowded. Later they will be dense enough to form pixel patterns - at first for fun, then for sale with special locked access for your own patch of the sky to look the way you choose, weather permitting. The poor people will have to look at something unattractive of course.
My Meade lost it's front row seat long ago. This is giving me a "Fran"ick Attack :(
Well it was a bit of a task finding you on you tube, the last time I watched was before I understood the importance of subscribing and thought the amalgorythme would bring me back? Your vid on a b bender guitar is what originally brought me here ! Now I am here to see a better out look on society as a whole ,I feel you seem to give hope to your species ? ha ha ! Now as far as your video shows, I am sure the way we [ our leaders?] are so war minded ,I am sure when we are capable of flying around in space we will be able to disintegrate any thing in our path? Any how glad to reconnect with your channel again and happy you are ok as I started to think some thing bad may have happened? Remember what the big print givith the fine print taketh away ? lol : and a little more guitar would B nice? .Thanks Fran!
Unfortunately musk does not care about anything that doesn't make him money or boost his ego right now. He doesn't put a lot of thought into whether he will create problems for other people (or even himself) because no one in his life (except those on twitter, which he now seized control of) is willing to criticise him for mistakes or wrongdoing.
Can t we have ground infrastructure for internet?
I predict a collision of some kind effecting Hubble or GPS.
So we have created an impenetrable shield around the Earth. It's made garbage, and it prevents us from escaping.
With the vast size of the Earth, even 500K satellites is not as massive a number as it sounds
Time to start training astro-janitors.
As I watch this I was wondering, anyone, watching Fran Via Star link ? 🤔 come on Own up 🤨
Star link is great, light them candles Mr. Musk...
will work on it later just like we'll work on global warming later
The same question about forward thinking could be asked of those developing AI..
this woman is fabulous!
Space X Waste Dragon to the rescue.
Just FYI, 400,000 satellites is about one per 500 square miles. If say they were all compressed into a thin layer at the same altitude and the combined cross sectional area of a satellite and a rocket passing through this layer was 100 square yards then the chance of a collision is about one in 12 million.
The Hubble situation doesn't seem to be much of a problem, just put the next generation of space telescopes in a higher orbit than the networks.
What you saw a ufo? Naa it was just a satellite.
The James Webb telescope doesn't have that problem.
Ironically this is worse for professional telescopes than amateur astrophotographers. Airplane and satellite removal is basically baked into the stacking software we use. If a subframe has an airplane going through it, I just leave it. I remove the subframes with clouds, but not with satellites. But for professional telescopes, every second of imaging time is precious. They can't afford to just throw away data like I can.
we will trap our self to this planet
I'm not sure how StarLink can be of much use as a "last mile" provider except for rural areas and remote regions. How many users are we actually talking about? You can build 250 (300ft) towers for every launch that is completed (including all communications equipment), with towers lasting between 30-50 years. Dotting the landscape with towers would appear to make more sense (using RF point-to-point mesh system - as is basically already being done). I don't really see any advantages to such a system with