Contributors

Friday, August 28, 2020

Elon Musk Is a Vandal Scrawling His Name across the Heavens

For all his professed love for space exploration and expanding the frontiers of human knowledge, Elon Musk sure has a horrible way of showing it:

The above image, taken with a 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo, shows the tracks that Musk's Starlink satellites make in astronomical observations. Musk is a vandal scrawling his name across the heavens. And this is only the beginning:

SpaceX has so far launched over 600 satellites and OneWeb has launched 74. Both companies plan to eventually launch tens of thousands of satellites into low-Earth orbits and provide broadband to areas that lack fast wired service. Amazon is also planning to launch thousands of satellites. Because of their low-Earth orbits (LEO), the satellites will provide lower latency than traditional satellite networks.
 
A cloud of these satellites in orbit will kill earth-based astronomy. These tracks will make it impossible to image distant galaxies and extra-solar planets. Hundreds of telescopes across the Earth, installed at a cost of billions of dollars to universities and governments, will be rendered useless.
 
We've already got plenty of terrestrial internet access with our existing cellular networks, and with 5G coming out, what's the point?
 
And the idiotic thing is, who really needs this? Is it that important to stream episodes of "The Bachelor" while driving across Montana or sailing your yacht across the southern Atlantic?
 
You could argue that it's important to give internet access to the teaming masses across Africa and the trackless wastes of Northern Canada and Siberia, where there are no land lines and only spotty cell coverage. But how profitable is that market going to be?

I have a hard time believing three different companies will be able to make a go of launching hundreds of thousands of satellites. The launch costs will be, well, astronomical. Because there are so many satellites, they have to be cheap to build, which means each one won't last very long (the intense radiation in space plays hell with electronics), so there will have to be an constant, ongoing program of launches to replace dead satellites.
 
Two if not three of these companies will go bankrupt in the process, leaving the skies littered with useless space junk. There's already too much debris in orbit, and these satellites will make the problem that much worse.

And it's not just astronomy that will suffer. With this many satellites there will eventually be collisions with military reconnaissance satellites, the space station, and manned and unmanned launch vehicles. Such collisions can cause large clouds of debris, potentially causing a chain reaction that could affect dozens of satellites.

Finally, we use earth-bound telescopes to monitor space for asteroids that may run into Earth. Hundreds of thousands of satellite tracks will make it that much harder to predict deadly collisions with our home planet. 

I used to think Elon Musk was sort of cool. He's done good work with SpaceX and Tesla. But now, with his Twitter rants, stock price pumping, and the idiotic submarine/pedo guy debacle, he's turning into a Lex Luthor clone, only with more hair and an accent. But a lot dumber.

At least he won't be able to become president of the United States.

No comments: