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Russia warns United States: use of SpaceX for spying makes its satellites a target
(www.reuters.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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Starlink launches forty-ish Starlink sats every other week, Russia could deplete it's entire arsenal of missiles and, if they're lucky, cause a hole in their coverage.
Starlink needs deleting too, so that would be perfect.
As someone who spends a lot of time in the outdoors, I have to disagree with you. I'm very excited about how this will simplify logistics, and make getting weather etc much easier.
The skies are already polluted with Starlink satellites and there's even more coming. I agree that is does solve some situations, but it's being done for profit, not for undeveloped areas. Sticking more shit in our skies for money is really sad, I am surprised there's not more international regulations for this kind of satellite spam.
This is such a Lemmy comment, there's nothing evil about providing a service for a price.
Not on its own. Polluting the skies for profit is the problem. Why the cherry picking though?
Do you also think cell towers are "polluting the landscape"?
Of course cell towers are an eye sore. Though they are more necessary than starlink, often hidden by landscape or on top of buildings anyway. It's not the "gotcha" comparison you think it is.
Why are they more necessary? They both do the same job.
Perhaps necessary was the wrong word, though I don't know if starlink supports the same bands the towers already do for 2G, 3G, 4G etc. They don't obstruct our skies, so that's much preferable.
Starlink sats are only visible to the naked eye when they've just launched, once in orbit they're only a problem for ground based optical astronomy, and even then it doesn't seem to be as much of a problem as everyone makes out.
I get that you probably hate Musk, but a lot of the points you're making are just nonsense.
Ahhh so it is about Musk and you are a fan. I wont engage anymore, have a good one.
Where did I say I was a fan of him?
You're making judgement calls about the technology because you hate the owner of the company, which is kinda sad.
What's evil is what that incentivizes. It's not solving problems but building profit.
Providing a service for a price is not the problematic part.
The problem with serial killers isn't that they want money in exchange, either.
That makes absolutely no sense.
Oh it does, despite you not understanding it. The point is that even though someone does something for money, that does not mean what they do is not harmful.
And before you ~~ask~~ say this does not have to do anything with this topic, the reason I said that, is that I think what spacex is doing here is harmful.
Who said it wasn't? You're arguing against a point nobody made.
In your "this is such a lemmy comment" reply you sounded to be condeming the other user for their anti-spacex opinion.
Also, I've fixed a typo in my previous comment, in the part of it that you have quoted. The quote is fine, just telling it in case it has caused misunderstanding.
Their opinion seemed to be a combination of hatred for capitalism and Elon Musk, and they came off to me as being grasping at straws to justify that opinion.
Maybe, but spacex polluting the sky with their satellites is also a good reason to hate on spacex, I think
🙄
I've never had to do anything to get the weather. It just arrives and does its thing.
If there were more third-world people here they'd probably agree with you as well. Last I checked there's like one or two cables going into the entire continent of Africa.
It's actually a really good idea, with the main exception being the impact on astronomy. That Musk happens to be the guy behind this first network is just an unfortunate coincidence.
As a person who lives in the third world I absolutely do not want the internet to only be controlled by American corporations from space and would much rather fund proper fiber optics and connections.
Starlink is probably a stopgap measure for areas that still have to build up the physical infrastructure for the real solution.
It’s more of a solution for having internet available just about anywhere. Probably good for various emergency/rescue scenarios.
I still don't want the Americans to be controlling literally anything I use or interact with. They will harvest that data to execute military operations against leftists where I live. No fucking thanks, keep your Starlink.
Sad American upvote for that. I can’t imagine how this country must look to people around the world.
Ah. Yeah, I guess that's true. It is an American thing. Would you feel better if it was European or Chinese?
Wire infrastructure is great, but it's just damn expensive, and manufacturing+laying it can be very specialised labour. Even here in Canada not everyone has it in rural areas. Meanwhile, small satellite swarms pass over everywhere by force of geometry, and are actually still pretty fast internet.
Not really, but of that list only China hasn't directly colonized the country I live or send storm troopers into the forest to murder people in the past decade. I would like the taxes we pay here to go towards developing ourselves, we can pay to educate networking engineers and subsidize the work ourselves and hook into the internet as a peer instead of as a subscriber. Third world countries aren't poor because we have no money, we're poor because we're trapped in bad loan agreements, have lopsided international investment and bad interior planning which prefers plantation cash crops over food security.
Yeah, development is a "sticky wicket". I didn't mean to speak on your behalf when you're there to speak for yourself, so sorry about that.
And we even made a whole movie about Kessler syndrome :|
Enjoy spreading misinformation online? There are valid criticisms against LEO constellations but Kessler syndrome is not one of them
??
Did you read the comment? It's not about LEO satellites. It's about a military arsenal destroying a fleet of LEO satellites. The satellites won't do a Kessler, but a fleets worth of shrapnel would be a problem.
Which is exactly why Russia only needs a handful of rockets at most. You only need to make debris. The rest will sort itself out.
But that is a strategic capability, not a tactical one. It's another form of MAD.
Russia has nothing in that LEO orbit (that I'm aware of... I could be horrendously wrong). I don't think there's anything "mutually assured" here.
I'm pretty sure that starlink satellites are orders of magnitudes more expensive to manufacture and deploy than the weapons that can target them.
Really? You can put up 50 starlinks at a time for tens of millions of dollars, whereas asats need a more expensive an maneuverable kill vehicle and a launch for each one with lots more complicated targeting and maneuvering. It's pretty hard to track and follow something down moving so fast through space and hit it. Plus Russia just doesn't have the launch capacity to put up that much mass to orbit.
Not to mention that SpaceX has designed things so that they can piggyback starlink deployments on the back of other commercial launches. So, for example, AT&T pays them $25 million to launch a new telecom satellite, and they toss in another dozen or so starlink satellites along with it.
AT&T pays for the majority of the launch costs and starlink benefits from it.
How do you know that? You're launching an entire rocket to kill one satellite, that can't be cheap.
Yes, it is probably expensive, but a satellite is probably even more expensive, and not just by a little.
I don’t think it is… one of the satellites cost USD 250k in 2019. it is likely cheaper now.
There have been Anti Satellite Weapon tests (for example from China) to see if it is feasible. The cost for such an attack would be much much higher than 250k (we are talking multiple millions)
They do have more equipment on them now, so it's possible they've gone up in cost.
Hmm you made me think and if they use their reusable rockets tech and maybe some other similar things, it may be cheaper in the end because they save a lot of money in places where others don't
I doubt it, not at the rate they throw them up.
Maybe, but one of the best traits about Musk is he's willing to throw money at this regardless of profit. So he's gunna keep throwing up more of these satellites, while Russia's rocket supply is only going to get harder to resupply for the foreseeable future.