You might not believe this, but I agree with you! Doing something to the best of your ability includes the right to be able to suck at it also. I am pressing for absolutely no standard of quality, yet you somehow think that's the case. It's not. I just think that if you're going to call yourself a maintainer of something, then you better at least pretend.
I disagree. I really think doing an intentionally crappy job is acceptable. Not even pretend. I think it is okay to really half-arse it. Or break it. Or be lazy. Or whatever. Except maybe intentionally harm someone.
My point is that GDPR raised the bar of our expectations of what a consumer can demand from a provider. As such, perhaps it is not unreasonable to expect that there would be an expectation from other services, especially if they are integral to the operation of many services that have personal information of millions of people.
As a pure hypothetical, imagine a critical bug was discovered in Rails that would potentially allow someone to attack any Rails website and extract personal information. Further, imagine someone quickly submitted a PR with a patch for this, such that Rails could then do a quick release and make sure it gets to every Rails consumer as fast as possible.
What if the Rails maintainers then ignored the patch, and said it was boring. Legally they are under no obligation to do anything really. And you could argue that it's on every one of the thousands of sites that chose to use Rails if they get hacked and expose user information. And further, you could argue that if people don't like this situation, they are "free to fork Rails" with the patched version. All this is fair, but I think others might say that the Rails maintainers at this point did fail in a responsibility. There are arguments for both sides, but I do not think it is as simple as "the maintainers owe people absolutely nothing" as at some point being the nexus of updates actually gives them an almost stopping or blocking power, not just the more passive refusal to fix the problem themselves.
This scenario is clearly different in magnitude from what happened with this project. That being said, my only point is that it is fair to expect a certain amount of activity in a project that bills itself as production-ready (and asks you to use it). I personally would be very weary before committing to telling someone something is production ready casually, regardless of whether the "fault" ultimately rests on them. That being said, this of course does not entitle anyone to treating others poorly, my only point is that the responsibilities and expectations are not well understood in this domain.
Security isn't a special license for being nasty. Criticism is fine, even with some urgency due to security being important.
But software done for free by volunteers carries no obligation of a legal or even a moral kind, whatsoever. This is completely different from selling software or doing work for hire or donations. There a moral and often even legal obligation exists.
Launch capacity scaling isn't only possible through useless comsats.
And astronomy is still an extremely important component for becoming space-faring. No use in going somewhere blindly when you can have a look first. But if there is no-one looking because nothing to see, funding dried up, scientists demotivated,...
For radio we might be able to make it work. But we currently don't have the ability to position satellites to within 10 nanometers, which would be required to make this work in the optical range that you have just killed off on the ground.
one gets time signals from photomultipliers, but those are too bulky for traditional pixel sensors. And something as bright as a satellite flare might fry them at an unexpected moment. They are usually built and tuned to be able to observe few to single photons.
The key point is usable observation time. Our current handful of satellite telescopes provide 24h of time a day. Each terrestrial telescope provides maybe 8h. However, there are a magnitude more telescopes on Hawaii alone than in space. You would need to get a hundred satellite telescopes to begin to replace earthbased observation time.
And that doesn't even begin to talk about the possible instruments, mirror sizes, astronomical costs of buulding and running satellites, etc.
Satellites are invisible if they're in the Earth's shadow. By the time useful observation can begin, there's an enormous swath of the sky that will have zero visible satellites in it.
Diversify your observation targets. There's more than one interesting thing to science at any given moment. If that means spreading out your observations so you spend two hours a night observing four targets as opposed to four hours a night on two targets, so be it.
At the very worst, this means astronomers will need to do more work during the day shift scheduling and prioritizing. This isn't a new problem. I remember reading a back page article in Astronomer magazine sometime in the late 90s with a page of BASIC code. Someone wanted to optimize a computer controlled telescope to make one observation of 100 or so stars every night. You need to roughly minimize the total Manhatten distance between every two observations, while also eliminating observations below the horizon and penalize observations low in the sky. So the author wrote a program to roughly approximate the traveling salesman problem with the additional constraints. In the 90s. In BASIC. In one page. It might be NP complete to get the perfect solution, but good enough is pretty good.
Add an additional constraints penalising observations where they might be impacted by satellites. Hire an intern working on their degree who's taken an optimization course and have them do it for you.
>And that doesn't even begin to talk about the possible instruments, mirror sizes, astronomical costs of buulding and running satellites, etc.
We're going to have to start thinking bigger if we want to leave this rock. Might as well start now.
The real risk is Elon's companies dissolving and the satellites adding pollution for no real gain. If I could trade observatory time for (working) world-wide internet, I'd take the latter with no hesitation.
As much as I sympathize, most of the cosmos aren't really going anywhere. It'll be there after we build hundreds of telescopes.
Modern astronomy works at the edges of whats possible, a single frame might take hours. Needing multiple frames would mean multiple days per observation. It would mean no longer seeing faint and distant objects, limiting us to younger, closer and frankly far more boring objects. It would make observing variability impossible for certain timescales.
You need old distant objects for cosmology, observing the structure if the universe, big bang and stuff. You need variability for finding exoplanets, measuring distance and observing transitions such as supernovae.
Oh, and then a huge part is taking spectra, which means bouncing the light directly off a grating. Filtering transients is hard to impossible there. You need spectra for relative motion, magnetic fields, composition of matter and radiation and of course temperature.
Needing such filters would set astronomy back a few decades
If someone doesn’t manage or govern it with economic incentives, no one does (see: most of the “public good” rainforest slashed and burned in South America and Asia that we desperately needed managed better, through private ownership and conservation management, to avert climate change).
You’re shocked at my statement, as if StarLink is entitled. Consider the alternative argument: why should astronomy slow global comms progress? If astronomy is more valuable than the ~$30 billion/year global comms market, shouldn’t someone bear that cost?
Because ultimately, arguments relying solely on economics are moot.
Technically, a human life has an economic value. And yes such value is used every day to decide health policies and insurance coverage. Would this mean that SpaceX killing N humans (where N=30B*number of years of operation planned for starlink/value of a human live) is ok? Absolutely not.
No it doesn't. If you know something will kill people, economic arguments are not considered sufficient. This was famously decided when it was revealed Ford elected not to recall the Pinto on the basis of paying compensation was cheaper then the fleet maintenance they had to do.
Not considered sufficient to avoid penalties in a court of law. But even that example can be reframed as a failure to calculate total risk in the cost / benefit analysis (i.e. they should have factored in the risk of a lawsuit and federal fine).
This is actually one of the more interesting questions in space exploration in general. It has been ever since someone tried charging NASA for parking on the section of the moon they claim ownership of.
Defense would actually be quite easy. Just undesirable. There are working antisat weapons in the major powers' arsenals. However, they would produce nasty debris clouds.
And then there is also the vulnerability of the lauch site and control center...
Not in general. A kinetic striker would require as much energy to reach the satellite as the satellite used to get there. Something fancier, like a targeted laser, to my knowledge doesn't exist with anything like the wattage needed to punch through atmo and still have effective kill on anything that far out (assuming you could solve the targeting problem to resolve the beam that tightly in the first place).
The satellite is in orbit. It requires significantly more energy to put something in orbit than merely reachin that altitude. Satellite killers are relatively small rockets that can use a small supersonic fighter jet as first stage, while it requires a much bigger rocket to put a satellite in space (it would depend on the orbit of course).
It is true that spacex can put a significant amount of satllites in orbit witha single launch though, so it probably evens it out.
That makes the relationship sound adversarial, when really there's mutual benefit to SpaceX and the international astronomy community. Astronomy can use cheap lifting capabilities.
It's a complicated question, but there are echoes of it in "Why does the US get the privilege of having their flag on the moon, just because they could get it there and nobody can take it back down?" or "Why do people have any right to the land they occupy, merely because they got there before other people did?"
It’s not complicated. The answers to your questions are, “Because they can.” Possession, control, and force carry much more weight than some would like. It just makes those without power, authority, or any other stakeholder equity uncomfortable.
The US is not a super power because it asked politely and a committee granted it permission. Similarly, SpaceX will move forward because anyone with the authority to challenge them allows them to proceed.
The only limit might be publishing something that is actively intended to do harm. But I can't imagine a plausible example of that...