[AntiUSAbah]

Its not always on. Its only 'always' on if you would orbit the sun which starlink can't do, it has to orbit the earth. This only works in a certain constelation which would create a halo around our planet, without clear understanding what even would do.

The more power you consume, the more power you need to dissipate. These constelations wouldn't be small at all. It would also take a interesting solution to be able to move this heat from very small very intense areas to very big cooling areas. How?

And space is not easy. Space is very very cold which puts a lot of stress on materials. It has radiation. And it has A LOT of microasteroids. Stuff in Space breaks down due to this. You would need to replace all of this stuff regularly with resources from the planet earth.

You would basically just spend a lot of resources throwing a lot of resources out into space. You can't even recycle all of this.

Its still lunatic at our current state of our current system. There is so so much space on our planet. Its ridicoulous

The only reason Musk is saying stuff like this is because he knows there is no market and he needs to keep his system alive

[geertj]

The always on orbit exists and is called a dawn-dusk Sun synchronous orbit. It is an orbit that is always above the terminator (line between night and day) where it can face the Sun 100% of the time.

This orbit has to rotate about a degree every day to follow the terminator as the earth orbits the Sun. It uses the equatorial bulge of the earth to achieve that rotation without have to spend rocket fuel. It is really quite interesting.

[adrian_b]

But the slots on such Sun-synchronous orbits are limited and many applications want them.

A few datacenters could occupy some slots, but it would be difficult to accept a large number of datacenters obstructing such orbits.

[saalweachter]

Aren't dusk-dawn orbits already the most crowded orbital space with the most orbital debris?

[geertj]

Yes they are crowded. There are engineering solutions to that, including formation flying based on absolute positioning and space tethers. It is a great time to be an engineer.

[svantana]

A polar low earth orbit can be always-on (no earth shadow). Each satellite will be in thermal equilibrium, around 10°C. Catastrophic destruction from micrometeoroids is rare. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but I don't see any dealbreakers in the math/science.

[mapt]

Kessler Syndrome is the biggest dealbreaker. We're already fairly far advanced in that scenario from Starlink, and competitors/scaleouts to Starlink promise to be worse.

If you plug eleventy trillion dollars of hope that the aristos can finally replace the working class into the issue, Earth loses access to low orbit from orbital debris almost immediately.

Their entire mindset cannot deal with this. Low orbit is a physically-enforced type of commons, inextricably tied to tragedy if overpopulated. You cannot privatize it and scale indefinitely. There is no defense, and any pissed off individual actor who gets malicious can burn it to the ground.

[m4rtink]

Starlinks are in low enough orbit to passively decay in less than 5 years, that really can't meaningfully contribute to a Kessler syndrome.

Chinese mega constellations on higher orbits & their spent stages left in space are a bigger issues.

Still in case it got going & made higher orbits unusable, starlink would likely still work just fine on the lower self-cleaning orbits, not to mention using a partial (and hopefully soon full) RLV for replenishment.

[mapt]

A recent paper came out calculating that it would take two days of lights out at SpaceX headquarters for the whole constellation to shred itself, it was already so reliant on avoidance maneuvers.

SpaceX immediately responded by lowering its target orbits by 70km, the maximum it could legally do without renegotiating formally.

When a high orbit develops Kessler Syndrome, the billions of pieces of debris rain down on lower orbits and cause cascading collisions there, and they keep doing it for centuries.

Not understanding how any of this works, the scientists not being capable of convincing the politicos, or the leaders not being able to escape their local maxima of public stances to recognize a real threat, is a massive, civilizational level hubris. This is pass/fail - the math does not care about our level of understanding or maturity.

[NetMageSCW]

Incorrect. It was two days for one collision to occur. Most of the debris would then decay in a few weeks.

Stop trying to make Kessler Syndrome a thing. It was never a thing, it won’t be a thing, it will never be a thing.

[mapt]

If COVID taught us anything, it's that logarithmic growth functions don't get no respect. They are so alien to so much of the population that you can't get real phenomena taken seriously, no matter how many grains of rice you pile on chessboards.

Every collision increases the chance of additional collisions.

"Weeks"? SpaceX is aiming to be within the guideline of 25 years for the intact spacecraft, with solar panels unfurled. The want at minimum five years of business operations out of it. Half a spacecraft is still going to be decades (if not centuries if they lose the panels), and small chunks of spacecraft years.

[AntiUSAbah]

5 years is still 5 years and Musk needs A LOT of payload for SpaceX to justify 1 Trillion dollars.

This 1 Trillion Dollar has to be translated to either sending up A LOT of foreign payload OR his payload; All of this payload = new Satelites. Its not like we are sending earth resource up in space to build a dyson sphere.