Why does the sky only belong to researchers and not all of humanity? The number of humans interested in faster internet far exceeds the number of humans interested in earth-based telescopes.
Starlink does theoretically solve the problem of internet access for everyone, everywhere. At once.
The sky is beautiful and free for anyone who can look up towards it.
There are several other competitors with satellites already in orbit or launches scheduled. So, assuming there is no collusion, competitive pressure should ameliorate a lot of the concerns about concentration of control.
Some of the competitors are even partly owned by governments (e.g. OneWeb and the UK govt) and thus look slightly more like a public utility.
If we see said one man actually controlling who has access, I think that's an appropriate time to take issue, and I expect many people would take issue.
Starlink/OneWeb/Kuiper solve a much bigger problem than just rural US coverage.
> land based solutions will always be lower latency/faster if built right
Not necessarily true due to the speed of transmission in fiber vs. speed of light in vacuum (once the Starlink laser links are set up).
Such as? The only use cases it addresses are upper class users who want to go off-grid, and state/military operations (Already being tested by US forces btw).
> Not necessarily true due to the speed of transmission in fiber vs. speed of light in vacuum (once the Starlink laser links are set up).
Absolutely misleading argument. I can push a trickle of water at the speed of light it would still not allow me to watch netflix in 4k. The issue with satellite internet is channel capacity.
Also bandwith wise the satellite has to keep plexing between all user nodes in it's range. You go beyond a few thousands users and your speed starts dropping. that can only be addressed by adding more and more satellites, where do you stop?
There are a lot of close-to-poverty-line indigenous communities in the US and Canada adopting Starlink. e.g.:
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/10/remot...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-starlink-internet-fir...
There are already loads of NGOs (e.g. [3]) operating in rural developing nations to install solar power for village community centers. It's a small step to install a shared satellite internet terminal at the same time.
The jump in quality of life and opportunities from zero connectivity to a 100MBps shared village link is massive. You hugely expand access to telehealth, weather information, education opportunities, etc.
Unfortunately photos often distort reality, (which is the author's intent here). They purposefully stacked the multiple images in such a way to amplify the satellites clarity, rather than stacking them in a way that would instead have resulted in a clear sky but a slightly elevated noise floor.
Lets say, maybe a couple of Astronomy PHds students whose thesis just got ruined, could start a new SETI project. Or more light and gravity studies of Einstein findings :-) I would guess a couple of lasers randomly firing upwards from an Telescope site could not possibly cause issues for low earth satellites, could it ? ;-)
The environmental argument is an interesting one and i have no idea on the total lifetime damage of both solutions. The heaviest digging will be required where there are humans living any way. Laying cables and maintenance while probably more expensive also has some benefits such a high paying jobs, distributed all over the world instead of increasing the worlds Gini coefficient further. I would recognize Starlink as a good idea (outweighing the negatives) if it would be public infrastructure but that train has sailed.
The satellites are actively controlled and can be commanded to deorbit. If a court ordered it (incredibly unlikely), SpaceX could immediately order all the satellites to deorbit. This is a reversible situation if such a need arose.
"Here, hold my beer..." - Elon Musk
Also, the picture shared seems pretty clickbaity. Not sure who took it but they must be amateurs if they can't mask objects obviously moving on known orbits between frames.
Also, the answer to your question is that researchers don't ruin the sky for everyone.