|
|
|
|
|
by roughly
2135 days ago
|
|
It's definitely fair. Per the article, there's currently ~2600 satellites in orbit; Amazon is looking to more than double that, and SpaceX is asking to add ~16x that number. I think we're well within our rights as society and as humans generally to put the onus on them not to fuck up astronomy for the next century. And since when has "It's difficult" been a free pass? Both of those companies beat their chests about how neat their tech is, but when it comes to a genuinely hard problem - as in, how to launch this fleet without fucking up humankind's ability to gaze into the cosmos as we have for our entire history - you're going to let them duck it? And, to head off the obvious objection: I really, genuinely, truly don't care how difficult it is, why the physics make it difficult, what a vacuum does for heat, etc. I know. It's a hard problem. Maybe you don't get to launch fifty thousand satellites into orbit without solving it. |
|