The dark coating isn’t used anymore, they have a visor/sunshade instead. The satellites people can see with the naked eye have not reached their service orbit yet, and they are not aligned to use the sunshade (they are instead configured to raise orbit as quickly as possible).

As for the rules about polluting space, the simple fact is that none of the rules makers expected that some agency would want to launch thousands of satellites. There are no rules covering this scenario.

AFAIK the nearest we have to rules covering the proliferation of communications satellites are ITU rules on access to spectrum. There’s no restriction on the number of satellites, just who is using what frequency in which part of the sky.

If you want to add rules about the number of satellites in orbit, better get in quick before StarLink becomes too valuable to ban.

> If you want to add rules about the number of satellites in orbit, better get in quick before StarLink becomes too valuable to ban.

Question is, why would one want it? It's going to look like an equivalent of someone in XIX century capping the maximum amounts of widgets a factory can produce per year to a level that can be matched by artisan production, because all those conveyor belts and precision parts are making production too fast.

Assuming one likes the idea of humanity spreading out past Earth's surface, and perhaps taking the dirtiest aspects of civilization upwell - we're going to need a proper space-based economy. Mining, manufacturing and all. Starlink's impact on LEO is going to look like child's play in comparison. So if one wants to see space being developed, then one has to accept and embrace that Earth's orbit is going to get way more cluttered than it is.

In the surface of the Earth we have designated conservation areas, wilderness areas and “dark sky parks” all intended to reduce the impact of human industry on the natural environment.

We do not need StarLink to industrialise space, and we do not need factories in low Earth orbit to maximally utilise space-borne resources.

This desire to pollute our skies with industrial light pollution will look to future humans as ill-guided and poorly motivated as draining the swamps (and later wondering why our ecosystems are failing).

thanks for the precisions!

i fear however no one wants to rule on that, at least for now.

Would it apply only to the rich or to everyone? If everyone, then why bring out the richness?

Do you want to prevent satellites existing completely or just keep it at some threshold that has been crossed?

Most importantly, what's the actual problem here? You haven't pointed out any downsides of having increased mass in LEO.

> i understand the enthusiasm but shouldn't these decisions let to the people, countries, for instance a intergouvernemental agency.

The people elected the leadership which oversees the government agency which approved this project, so ultimately the people allowed this project to happen. This isn't a case of one person doing something alone.

I mean, they had to apply for a license to do it, and it was granted.

It doesn't work like that, "owning" and human laws in general are kind of a fantasy, to make an absurd hypothetical scenario to illustrate this: imagine the aliens landed on Earth, would you say they should first get a permit to anchor their spaceship somewhere before doing that? At the end of the day words on paper don't matter much, if Switzerland shoots those satellites down they could be deleted from the world map with some nukes, who has the power decides.

Whoever has power and the inclination to enforce their will upon others decides everything, period.

This whole fantasy of "rights" that people like to engage in is just that - a fantasy.

The best you can hope for is that the strongest is also a benevolent philosopher king.

Under the International Treaty for Outer Space, each signatory nation is responsible for regulating that activity of those operating from within their territory. Switzerland signed the treat in 1967 [1]

So that's all as it should be, and Switzerland agrees that the mechanism of regulation is the operant one.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty#Responsibil...

Effectively? Yes. Not in a “we can prevent anything we want” but a “we can do whatever we want” way.

"at our expense"? You clearly don't have to deal with rural internet if you think this is a net loss for society.

The whole point of this is that it isn't a non-profit, though. I'd love to live in a world where we can snap our fingers and motivate people to build $1/month internet, but that's not even a remote possibility. Starlink's big boon was that someone with money saw a problem and invested a ton of money into fixing it, hoping to turn a profit in the long-term. I'd love for someone to run fiber out to my house, but even getting it to my neighborhood would start at $30,000. Enter Starlink: cut out the landline companies and offer good internet, forcing the big players to offer better services in order to compete.

Also, if you think $100/month is expensive, you don't go shopping for rural internet very often. There isn't an ISP on the planet that offers the speeds or latency that Starlink has right now, and believe me, I've tried to find one. $500 for installation and $100/month is reasonably appropriate for the services they're providing, especially if they're taking a $1000-2000 loss on each dish they ship to customers.

I have an LTE access point, it's a pretty bad experience. For one, latency is very high. It's so laggy over SSH that it's basically unusable, and you can forget any VOIP apps with how choppy it is. Speeds are serviceable, but it doesn't really matter since I can't buy an LTE access point without a data cap.

The problem with laying fiber in the continental US (and I suspect also in Canada) is not typically cost. It's death by a thousand cuts with problems acquiring land rights, fighting incumbent ISPs and the local politicians and congressmen in their pockets, and simple will on the part of ISPs.

Google tried to make fiber cheap and ubiquitous with Google Fiber and failed. If an organization with the power, resources, and clout of Google can't get it done, I don't know who can short of the federal government getting involved (which, thanks to lobbyists, is unlikely).

LEO constellations bypass these issues almost entirely and ironically enough may motivate incumbent ISPs to try to compete and stop being so obstructive.

Google didn't fail, they gave up.

They have the money to do it, they didn't want to spend it. They thought everyone would start writing letters to their congressmen on their behalf and force the government into making the other big fiber ISPs play fair.

That's how fucking dumb so the so-called "smartest people in the room" can be.

Google should have budgeted $10 billion a year for 10 years for Google Fiber. And in 20 years' time, Google could have been the largest provider of fiber Internet service in the United States, possibly servicing almost every single address in the country. Instead, they did what they *ALWAYS* fucking do... it didn't "catch on" in a year or two's time and they abandoned it.

I can't wait to see Google utterly fail as a company, given how shit they are at execution of everything but the most obvious, largest, and easiest-to-enter markets.

Elon Musk entered the three hardest markets known to fuckin' mankind... automotive, orbital launch, and ISPs, and he's utterly destroying mother fuckers. If I was an executive involved with Google Fiber, I'd blow my brains out due to utter shame.

> Anyone have a good argument why we can't get $10 per month high speed internet in rural areas in the USA?

do you have any idea how much it costs to dig a trench? look up a calculator for figuring out the present value of a perpetuity that pays $10/mo. that will barely cover somebody digging a trench through your front yard, and laying fiber in it, let alone doing that down miles of rural street.

If you're seeing trains of satellites, those have not yet reached their parking orbits and have not oriented themselves or deployed their sunshades. Once they've gotten to where they're intended to be, they'll become far more dim and for the most part should only be visible during a brief period around dusk.