It's so infuriating... I occasionally do astrophotography and it's getting to the point where any long exposure just has satellite streaks everywhere... Fuck Musk.
this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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I remember just 10 years ago using a special app on my phone to alert me of any potential satellite flares so I could run out and catch them.
Now I can't look at the night sky for 2 minutes without seeing one.
You can actually see some in broad daylight. I was shocked one day looking up and seeing one (white dot in the picture, verified with sat tracking app).
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Don't fall for the clickbait reporting here. Musk has a history of making comically exaggerated claims. There won't be a million satellites just like there wasn't a 4000 km/h train, self-driving tunnel network, intercontinental rocket transport or Mars colony.
But there will be more satellites, and not just from SpaceX. They are already disturbing astronomers work, and it will only get worse.
There was no real debate about whether the world population is ok with it. Big corp has money, big corp acts for its interest and nothing else.
And I'm not denying the benefits of low-orbit satellites and having vast but lowly populated areas at last getting access to a fast Internet. I'm jùst pointing out that this whole thing is happening mostly out of control (or very very few control).
If you add that now international laws was shot and its body discarded in the toilet, also note that getting too much dependent on these satellites makes you very vulnerable to a military strike. I have no doubt that Russia, China and other countries (Iran?) are actively working on satellites destruction, with or without creating debris and giving us a Kessler syndrom. If you look at climate change, on-going life mass extinction, water scarcity, etc. there is little doubt that world leaders will make the worst possible decisions in the name of pragmatism (or religion, but it doesn't really matter).
The problem is that we offloaded "world leadership" to a bunch of ultra-rich sociopaths who only care about their own profit maximization. And they then made actual profit obsolete, since the only product they produce now is hype in the service of inflationary speculative assets. From a planetary perspective it looks like the human species is committing suicide.
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Literally nearly ever claim and promise from Elmo has been a lie so far, no idea why anyone believes this conman
He literally is a billionaire because he lies. Literally.
He is incompetent as fuck, he's a drug junkie, yet still there are so many people who look up to this shit stain
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This is how the night sky looks right now:
It's crazy to think that all this will be privately owned by ultra rich techno-fascists that are beyond any democratic control.
You know what they aren't beyond?
lmao I'm on PC and that gif takes up the entire screen in my notifications. Beautiful.
As much as I love the elegance of guillotines though, I do believe that we should use something a little more emblematic of the American working class... and which permits a feet-first approach:
LEO satellite internet service is life changing for people who live in underserviced, rural, and remote areas - but it’s a tragedy that it’s controlled by billionaires and the USA. Growth at all costs mindset cannot accept that they should exist only as an ISP of last resort, so they’re servicing urban areas and planning data centres.
It would be better to support public fiber infrastructure (through PUDs) in almost every way. I know not all remote areas can be reached with fiber, but most rural areas can be. My county has done exactly that with the rural portions - they focused on rolling it out to underserved rural areas first (even though it was more expensive to do that up front). Now, those rural areas have gigabit fiber and they didn't have to pay tens of thousands to wire it up to their homes.
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Elon Musk is such a goddamned literal supervillain that he managed to make the theme of Firefly wrong.
Apparently, they can take the sky from you.
i cannot describe how angry i would be at this shit.
Every day, these guys make our life worse and destroy what we love.
Why watch the night sky when you can watch these new exciting ads on your phone?
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LEO satellites decay very quickly every one of them will burn up in the atmosphere within 10 years. They need to be replaced constantly. As soon as spacex goes out of business these will all fall out of the sky.
Polluting atmosphere doing so.
That’s fair but unfortunately nothing compared to the pollution from launching them
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Don't count on it. These things don't just zip along in their orbits. LEO is crowded. They have to maneuver to avoid collisions... a lot.
Over the past six months, Starlink satellites have been increasingly performing collision avoidance maneuvers. According to a report filed by SpaceX with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), SpaceX broadband satellites were forced to avoid more than 25 thousand times from December 1, 2022 to May 31, 2023. And since their launch in 2019, the total number of maneuvers has reached 50 thousand.
If Starlink or any other mega-constellation company loses control of their satellites for any reason, there could be collisions. A recent study (Note: PDF) suggests that a sufficiently powerful CME could cause a runaway Kessler Syndrome in as little as 2.8 days if the loss of control lasts that long.
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I was a space kid, followed every space shot since 1965, was a super fan of Apollo 11, I had a subscription to Nat Geo growing up, just for the Space photos.
So I can't believe I'm saying this: Maybe we've gone far enough for now, and we should have a moratorium on space for the next 50 years.
We should concentrate on Earth for awhile, dontcha think?
I dunno, every engineer not working on space almost certainly ends up optimizing some sort of ad delivery system. The tech industry is almost completely enshittified.
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This isn't really space science related, just commercialization. And about focusing on Earth: we should let scientists work on what they're passionate about, IMO they'll be more motivated to research their field of choice
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They might put a million satellites into orbit, but they're certainly not going to be orbital data centers. At least not as we currently understand data centers. The idea that space is cold and therefore a great place to put data centers that get hot is the idea of a stoned moron talking out of their ass. Space is a vacuum, you know what else is a vacuum, the part of your portable coffee mug that keeps your beverage warm or cold for ages, because vacuum is a crazy good insulator. Just because space is cold doesn't mean the heat from an orbital data center can dissipate into it. This dumb idea is never going to happen unless data canter technology improves to the point where they aren't environmental disasters anymore.
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Billionaires don't give a fuck about anyone but themselves, not even their kids. And, we've all agreed to let billionaires run the world, it seems.
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Elon Musk is a plague upon the human condition. Our best hope in the US, right now, is that a Starship launch goes horribly right and hits the White House during a cabinet meeting with Elmo as a a guest. Burn it black...pave over it and start over. Preferably after a mandatory prison-raping of all billionaires, especially those who loved Epstein. Fuck em all...let god sort em out.
If this actually happens, I will dedicate my life to getting the funding to create a laser weapon that can shoot them out of the sky from Earth.
Then we'll play Space Invaders for keeps.
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They did a previous study on what 65,000 satellites would look like and that was pretty bleak. Also this bit:
Latitudes near 50° Will Experience the Worst Light Pollution.
Thats a large chunk of Europe.
Well that wannabe nazi took everything else, so why not the sky?
Don’t get mad. Think of the shareholders.
Now I'm curious. Can a satellite fly over a country without permission? I know that an aircraft can't. How far up from the Earth's surface does sovereignity end?
However high they can shoot
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List of Starlink and Starshield Launches - Wikipedia
~10,000 Satellites currently orbiting right now, and that's just Starlink.
Check out the list of launches under "Falcon 9 Launches > Starlink Launches." It's every other day now (sometimes consecutive days) that they launch another rocket, and each payload is carrying 20 to 60 satellites.
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