At a much higher cost, regardless of the advances in reusable rockets. Not to mention much harder to do maintence/upgrades/change instruments.

Arecibo Observatory didn't even receive enough funding to prevent it from colapsing. You can't replace the entirety of ground astronomy with space telescopes even if it got an order magnitude more funding, that also won't happen.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

|Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |ELT|Extremely Large Telescope, under construction in Chile| |ESO|European Southern Observatory, builders of the VLT and EELT| |JWST|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope| |LEO|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |VLT|Very Large Telescope, Chile|

|Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |Starlink|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|

^(6 acronyms in this thread; )^(the most compressed thread commented on today)^( has 16 acronyms.)
^([Thread #8636 for this sub, first seen 1st Mar 2023, 04:32]) ^[FAQ] ^([Full list]) ^[Contact] ^([Source code])

Good magazines can publish bad articles.

And unchecked exploitation of LEO as a commercial (and otherwise) resource is an existential threat to LEO itself.

Kinda seems like the train's a rollin' and we're all just along for the ride at this point.

Build telescopes on the moon idgaf global WiFi would be life changing in underdeveloped areas

At one time the vast majority of travel was by horse. Technology marches on.

There is a physical limit on how big scopes can be and we are reaching it. Also, other types of astronomy like radio are impacted by the transmissions.

> blatant click-bait magazine article

This magazine is quite respected and has published articles by more than 150 Nobel Prize-winning scientists. It's as good as it gets.

Stupid question but maybe the satellites don’t need to have flashing lights to work? Or is it not about that

The moon is not the best choice for a telescope

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/10/25/why-dont-we-put-a-space-telescope-on-the-moon/?sh=1538d7a6777f

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Shut up scientists, there's profits to be made. And all those denying it either don't know how bad it will get or worse.

In the future constellations will be millions of satellites, not just a few thousand like there are now. Every country will want their own for security reasons.

Yes, it is absolutely ridiculous to be going on about "existential threats". It will be somewhat of a nuisance. Astronomy will still happen, data will still be gathered, they'll just have their algorithms remove a few satellites from the thousands of photos taken.

Ultimately this is a problem that indicates its own solution: There's so much stuff up there because launching stuff has got so cheap, comparatively. Since launching stuff is getting so easy we'll be able to pop up space telescopes easier, too.

Instead of blatant click-bait magazine articles, here are the opinions on the subject directly from major professional observatories (a variation of a comment I made a while ago):

Below are four links to professional observatory opinions, with salient quotes. There will be effects, but they are in general minor, or there are mitigating actions being taken now, from satellite design modification to filtering software and timing.

• "The study finds that large telescopes like ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) and ESO's upcoming Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will be "moderately affected" by the constellations under development. The effect is more pronounced for long exposures (of about 1000 s), up to 3% of which could be ruined during twilight, the time between dawn and sunrise and between sunset and dusk. Shorter exposures would be less impacted, with fewer than 0.5% of observations of this type affected. Observations conducted at other times during the night would also be less affected, as the satellites would be in the shadow of the Earth and therefore not illuminated." [1]

• "Yet despite the increase in image streaks, the new report notes that ZTF science operations have not been strongly affected. Study co-author Tom Prince, the Ira S. Bowen Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Caltech, says the paper shows a single streak affects less than one-tenth of a percent of the pixels in a ZTF image ... Prince says that software can be developed to help mitigate potential problems; for example, software could predict the locations of the Starlink satellites and thus help astronomers avoid scheduling an observation when one might be in the field of view. Software can also assess whether a passing satellite may have affected an astronomical observation, which would allow astronomers to mask or otherwise reduce the negative effects of the streaks." [2]

• "Most recently, the NRAO and GBO have been working directly with SpaceX to jointly analyze and minimize any potential impacts from their proposed Starlink system. These discussions have been fruitful and are providing valuable guidelines that could be considered by other such systems as well ... Among the many proposals under consideration are defining exclusions zones and other mitigations around the National Science Foundation’s current radio astronomy facilities and the planned future antenna locations for the Next Generation Very Large Array." [3]

• More recently, the National Science Foundation has published an astronomy coordination agreement, detailing procedures and designs aimed at minimizing interference and interaction between observatories and Starlink (both ways, as observatories use sky-pointed lasers to create artificial stars for focussing and the like). [4]

Meanwhile, professional and amateur astronomers both have tools now to deal with the existing satellites and (far worse) night flying aircraft.

I'll say this one last time but I'm not going to beat a dead horse with more replies afterwards: The article title is clickbait garbage. Existential threat has an actual definition that is well understood, and it means threat of being 100% wiped out. This is clearly not the case, despite real concerns for terrestrial astronomy.

How many important ground based observations have been made while space based satellites are looking in another direction? Rhetorical of course but still.

Oh please, we have multiple telescopes in space already. There is no "existential threat" to astronomy. The hyperbole is all I am pointing out here, I don't disagree there will be significant impact.

Oh no! Now we can see all the TV screens they use to fake the sky 😡📺📺📺

Couldn't constellations of satellites provide even better astrotelescopy than anything we can do on the ground?

This is so ridiculously melodramatic it belongs in a fiction sub. Very disapointed by Scientific American. In the meantime:

• Astronomers (serious ones) have the means to easily deal with this
• We arent going to stop LEO traffic forever, not for any reason. Humanity belongs in space.
• Starlink pays for Starship which will make space telescopes affordable, and ground astronomy obsolete for science purpose
• Millions of people having internet access is more important than what is realistically a minor short-term inconvenience to astronomers. Really, shame on you.

Yeah nobody in this sub is interested in real research. It’s just a bunch of people who think that the end goal of humanity should be their favorite sci fi flick for some reason and that science is when you believe that anything is possible

There isn't a ton of nuance. First it started with Starlink. Everyone poo-pooed the concerns. Then Amazon and others announced constellations. Next governments will do it. In your life time, the impact on astronmical science will be significant and y'all will be,'"Didn't see that coming." Though more like you'll say "Yep, I predicted this."

Seems like only a nuisance for amateur astronomy just after dark or just before dawn. Agreed on the off world statement above.

The answer is always more space flight, not less.

But satellite manufacturers probably should be compelled to make their products less shiny.

Didn’t Starlink redesign for that purpose once already?

People in this subreddit don't care. People in general don't care, there isn't enough money in astronomy. They're not involved with astronomy as a science and this place is mostly devoted to discussions that are closer to science fiction. You'll just get pithy remarks about how astronomy should be spaced based now that don't acknowledge that the vast majority of observational work comes from ground based observatories and for good reason. /r/astrophysics might give you more discussion with interested parties.