[AQuantized]

Strongly disagree with this. If Earth based infrastructure was better there wouldn't be as much need for satellite based services at this scale. Depriving people of the opportunity to look at the natural sky, without it being besmirched by human objects, is a terrible downside.

It's bad enough that many people in light polluted cities can barely see major stars, never mind Andromeda or subtler constellations.

[Robotbeat]

This just isn’t accurate. Starlink is only barely visible under certain conditions near sunrise and sunset and most of the time cannot be seen by the naked eye, due to SpaceX inventing and deploying sunshade technology to reduce satellite visibility to the visible limit.

I think there is a lot of miss information out there about star link. Yes it does affect large survey telescopes but for the most part it isn’t a huge impact on the actual naked eye visible night sky. ISS & other space stations are FAR easier to see, outshining out even the brightest stars vs Starlink which can only be seen a small portion of the time with the naked eye (once in operational orbit). It has absolutely no impact on reducing visibility of Andromeda or subtle constellations.

[AQuantized]

This isn't just Starlink. Of course, hopefully Starlink's satellites will adhere more closely to the agreed threshold in the future, but that isn't set in stone, and once this becomes a profitable industry it seems unlikely corners won't be cut and lawmakers lobbied like in any other sector.

Of course, even meeting the agreed threshold currently still renders them visible in telescopes, and that applies to amateurs as well.

[Robotbeat]

I think it be good idea to have international rules and regulations with common sense limits to continue and improve upon what SpaceX has done voluntarily.

I don’t think it should be surprising or considered bad that you can see objects in space with telescopes. I don’t think we should stop sending stuff into space just because it’s detectable with sensitive instruments (which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to find ways to make scientific observations coexist). But I can definitely see an argument for limiting naked eye visibility.

[8note]

Afaik, Starlink hasn't shown itself to be profitable yet, so there may not be any need