• @Ilovethebomb
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    413 months ago

    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.

    • warm
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      3 months ago

      Starlink needs deleting too, so that would be perfect.

      • @Ilovethebomb
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        43 months ago

        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.

        • warm
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          3 months ago

          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.

          • @Ilovethebomb
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            -253 months ago

            but it’s being done for profit, not for undeveloped areas.

            This is such a Lemmy comment, there’s nothing evil about providing a service for a price.

            • warm
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              3 months ago

              Not on its own. Polluting the skies for profit is the problem. Why the cherry picking though?

              • @Ilovethebomb
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                -53 months ago

                Do you also think cell towers are “polluting the landscape”?

                • warm
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                  3 months ago

                  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.

                  • @Ilovethebomb
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                    -23 months ago

                    Why are they more necessary? They both do the same job.

            • @[email protected]
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              -23 months ago

              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.

                • @[email protected]
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                  3 months ago

                  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.

                  • @Ilovethebomb
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                    23 months ago

                    The point is that even though someone does something fun money, that does not mean what they do is not harmful.

                    Who said it wasn’t? You’re arguing against a point nobody made.

        • @[email protected]
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          3 months ago

          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.

          • @[email protected]
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            53 months ago

            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.

            • @[email protected]
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              43 months ago

              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.

              • @[email protected]
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                23 months ago

                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.

                • @[email protected]
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                  33 months ago

                  Sad American upvote for that. I can’t imagine how this country must look to people around the world.

                • @Ilovethebomb
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                  13 months ago

                  Of course this is coming from a .ml account.

            • @[email protected]
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              23 months ago

              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.

              • @[email protected]
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                23 months ago

                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.

                • @[email protected]
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                  23 months ago

                  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.

            • @Ilovethebomb
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              13 months ago

              That’s a great idea, let’s run fibre to ships, campervans, and places so remote it’s not even practical to run mains power!

      • @[email protected]
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        123 months ago

        Enjoy spreading misinformation online? There are valid criticisms against LEO constellations but Kessler syndrome is not one of them

        • @[email protected]
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          43 months ago

          ??

          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.

      • Saik0
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        13 months ago

        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.

          • Saik0
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            33 months ago

            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.

    • @[email protected]
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      -153 months ago

      I’m pretty sure that starlink satellites are orders of magnitudes more expensive to manufacture and deploy than the weapons that can target them.

      • @[email protected]
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        193 months ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          53 months ago

          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.

      • @Ilovethebomb
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        143 months ago

        How do you know that? You’re launching an entire rocket to kill one satellite, that can’t be cheap.

        • @[email protected]
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          13 months ago

          Yes, it is probably expensive, but a satellite is probably even more expensive, and not just by a little.

          • @[email protected]
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            93 months ago

            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)

            • @[email protected]
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              13 months ago

              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

            • @Ilovethebomb
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              13 months ago

              They do have more equipment on them now, so it’s possible they’ve gone up in cost.

          • @Ilovethebomb
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            33 months ago

            I doubt it, not at the rate they throw them up.

      • @[email protected]
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        -13 months ago

        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.