Tomoz. 12 hours from now.
Falcon 9, Starlink, 13 June, 10:21 AM UK time.
"Instantaneous launch", so no hours of waiting. Will either go at 10:21, or won't.
Another 60 satellites, for a global comms network, ie internet/phone everywhere. They have already launched about 400; thousands more to come.
Before that, for early birds, Rocket Labs, Electron. New Zealand. "Don't stop me now", which got stopped by high winds a few days ago.
Launch window: 05:43-07:32. Will be here.
Not so instant, and very early... but that link should show the replays after.
(, Fri 12 Jun 2020, 21:54, Reply)
Fly tipping in space
(, Fri 12 Jun 2020, 22:54, Reply)
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
--DNA
The Moon is in orbit, for example. It is quite a long way away. You could dump a trillion bags of waste into that area, and not even notice them. In fact, it'd still be quite hard to even detect one.
The volume of a sphere 380,000 km wide is about 21x10^25 cubic meters.
You could throw all the junk of Earth in there, and still not notice it. Even your Mum isn't that big.
(, Fri 12 Jun 2020, 23:22, Reply)
at the probability of two to the power of 276,709 to one against?
not even star crossed, just unlucky
(, Fri 12 Jun 2020, 23:31, Reply)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=y60Y323q__0
(, Sat 13 Jun 2020, 1:04, Reply)
(, Fri 12 Jun 2020, 23:54, Reply)
but 12,000 of the fuckers? Musk can fuck the fuck off. What a rotter.
(, Sat 13 Jun 2020, 14:33, Reply)
Having a large network in LEO affords faster connectivity than an equivalently sized geostationary or geosynchronous network. It is more dynamic and flexible, and less environmentally destructive than an equivalent surface based physical network.
The increased frequency of launches to LEO grants more opportunities for smaller organisations (e.g. communication companies, universities, small countries) to piggyback their payloads into orbit more affordably.
More people across the developing world will have better and faster access to the internet.
Also the constellations of satellites flying overhead are awe inspiringly wonderful. It is comforting to see them as a sign of human progress.
(, Sun 14 Jun 2020, 15:35, Reply)
fuck up my photographs big time, and I don't want to look up and see hardware. I want to see stars, planets and galaxies, not industrial equipment.
(, Sun 14 Jun 2020, 17:16, Reply)
JWST will launch soon*, probably**, next generation space telescopes are already in the pipeline, and if SpaceX get their Starship operating in a few years their lunar variant will be able to place a number of fairly large telescopes on the surface of the moon.
Useful astronomy is moving off-world, and I've seen some beautiful pictures of Starlink constellations. I think human made constellations are a thing of wonder, perhaps more so than the random movement of random accumulations of stellar nuclear waste.
*hopefully
**this century
(, Tue 16 Jun 2020, 14:49, Reply)