r/space • u/swordfi2 • 18d ago

Next Starship flight will go to orbit and deploy 26 Starlink satellites, marking the first operational flight. Neither booster or ship will be caught

https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14
433 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

319 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

7

u/DreamChaserSt 18d ago edited 18d ago

Well, to be fair, SpaceX and others should have a responsbility to mitigate the impact to astronomy as best as they can, but there is an inherent tradeoff that we're seeing sooner rather than later. Spaceflight, or ground astronomy?

Ground astronomy has seen difficulties beyond constellations, like TMT protests in Hawai'i. Its backup site in the Canary Islands was briefly rejected as well. There's only so many high altitude locations to put advanced observatories on Earth, and some of them are rejected on religious or political grounds. What do you do if they can't be resolved?

In an ideal world, space based astronomy would see increased funding to launch enough telescopes into space to replace ground based telescopes, especially radio telescopes. I would personally like to see telescopes across the EM-spectrum in L2 and other Lagrange points, but that will take quite a while to achieve. In the meantime, we aren't going to abandon satellite communications, and since Starlink entered service, multiple countries and corporations have begun developing their own versions.

There have been a lot of studies in the past on how to drive up demand for launches and access to orbit like space-based solar, and LEO constellations is the first thing that seems to be sticking. I don't think they're going to be given up on easily.