Adding capacity at the tippy top of the market, while destroying capacity at the much larger middle/bottom of the market, is very unlikely to be net positive.
- Starlink interferes with terrestrial telescopy much less than the baseline issues such as weather, atmosphere, etc.
- SpaceX has already done great work in ameliorating these issues anyway with better non-reflective coatings and design.
- Telescopes in space are orders of magnitude more useful than terrestrial ones, so it would not be a surprising net positive at all.
- Even if the previous point weren't true, telescopes are not really equivalent to taking kids to school. One is a necessity, the other is a nice to have. The truth is that most of the low-hanging astronomical fruit that can be gleaned from the "middle/bottom of the market" has already been picked anyway. Almost all new/significant astronomical discoveries/research are happening with space-based telescopes for exactly this reason. People aren't unraveling the secrets of the universe with a telescope in their backyard anymore.
- This entire situation has really nothing to do with Starship being a good thing. You can argue that Starlink is a net negative (for all the above reasons this seems hard to justify in practice), but that argument is orthogonal to whether or not Starship is good. This isn't really your fault because the parent comment is the one that initially conflated the two, but I felt this point should be made.
These seem like good points! I personally don’t have a super strong idea of how destructive Starlink is, so totally open to the idea that “the astronomers don’t know what they’re talking about.” Just that’s a very different argument than “astronomers should shut up because some day we hope to put up telescopes they’ll probably never be able to use,” which is basically GP’s argument.
In any case the degree of interference thing isn’t too comforting since I would assume these issues are additive to one another.
Thank you for the good counterpoints! Would love to hear an astronomer’s take on whether the terrestrial-hanging-fruit has been picked, so to speak. It would not surprise me for sure.
