Starlink launches forty-ish Starlink sats every other week, Russia could deplete it's entire arsenal of missiles and, if they're lucky, cause a hole in their coverage.
As someone who spends a lot of time in the outdoors, I have to disagree with you. I'm very excited about how this will simplify logistics, and make getting weather etc much easier.
The skies are already polluted with Starlink satellites and there's even more coming. I agree that is does solve some situations, but it's being done for profit, not for undeveloped areas. Sticking more shit in our skies for money is really sad, I am surprised there's not more international regulations for this kind of satellite spam.
Of course cell towers are an eye sore. Though they are more necessary than starlink, often hidden by landscape or on top of buildings anyway. It's not the "gotcha" comparison you think it is.
Perhaps necessary was the wrong word, though I don't know if starlink supports the same bands the towers already do for 2G, 3G, 4G etc. They don't obstruct our skies, so that's much preferable.
Starlink sats are only visible to the naked eye when they've just launched, once in orbit they're only a problem for ground based optical astronomy, and even then it doesn't seem to be as much of a problem as everyone makes out.
I get that you probably hate Musk, but a lot of the points you're making are just nonsense.
If there were more third-world people here they'd probably agree with you as well. Last I checked there's like one or two cables going into the entire continent of Africa.
It's actually a really good idea, with the main exception being the impact on astronomy. That Musk happens to be the guy behind this first network is just an unfortunate coincidence.
As a person who lives in the third world I absolutely do not want the internet to only be controlled by American corporations from space and would much rather fund proper fiber optics and connections.
I still don't want the Americans to be controlling literally anything I use or interact with. They will harvest that data to execute military operations against leftists where I live. No fucking thanks, keep your Starlink.
Ah. Yeah, I guess that's true. It is an American thing. Would you feel better if it was European or Chinese?
Wire infrastructure is great, but it's just damn expensive, and manufacturing+laying it can be very specialised labour. Even here in Canada not everyone has it in rural areas. Meanwhile, small satellite swarms pass over everywhere by force of geometry, and are actually still pretty fast internet.
Not really, but of that list only China hasn't directly colonized the country I live or send storm troopers into the forest to murder people in the past decade. I would like the taxes we pay here to go towards developing ourselves, we can pay to educate networking engineers and subsidize the work ourselves and hook into the internet as a peer instead of as a subscriber. Third world countries aren't poor because we have no money, we're poor because we're trapped in bad loan agreements, have lopsided international investment and bad interior planning which prefers plantation cash crops over food security.
Really? You can put up 50 starlinks at a time for tens of millions of dollars, whereas asats need a more expensive an maneuverable kill vehicle and a launch for each one with lots more complicated targeting and maneuvering. It's pretty hard to track and follow something down moving so fast through space and hit it. Plus Russia just doesn't have the launch capacity to put up that much mass to orbit.
Not to mention that SpaceX has designed things so that they can piggyback starlink deployments on the back of other commercial launches. So, for example, AT&T pays them $25 million to launch a new telecom satellite, and they toss in another dozen or so starlink satellites along with it.
AT&T pays for the majority of the launch costs and starlink benefits from it.
Maybe, but one of the best traits about Musk is he's willing to throw money at this regardless of profit. So he's gunna keep throwing up more of these satellites, while Russia's rocket supply is only going to get harder to resupply for the foreseeable future.