"Starlink is saving lives in Ukraine, providing high speed internet to native reservations in Canada, hooking up schools in Africa to the internet and provides a viable method for my local sugar shack to get faster than dialup speeds."

Except for the first one, all of this can be done with fiber networks. Satellite internet should only be used for emergencies and extremely remote locations, it should be the exception rather than the norm.

"Your dislike of SpaceX seems to be motivated by Reddit Cool."

I dislike only Starlink, and that's because it is interfering with astronomical observations. I applaud SpaceX's efforts with reusable rockets, Starship, the dragon capsule.

"Starship has a 9 m diameter and can carry a 7 m mirror without the origami required for JW. The astronomy world is already looking at it."

Starship is still unproven. When (or if) it is operational, it will certainly be very useful to launch cheaper space telescopes, but this does not mean in any way that space telescopes will make ground-based observatories obsolete. Ground telescopes will always be cheaper and more convenient to operate and maintain.

And a 7m space mirror is not enough when ground telescopes are already at 30-40 meters. So "space origami" will still be necessary if we want to rival the resolution of ground-based telescopes.

"In the last 120 years we moved from gliders to Artemis. It will not take centuries to take the next steps."

And in the last 50 years we moved from crewed missions to the Moon to just now returning to crewed missions to the Moon. For the last 50 years a Mars crewed mission has always been just "20 years away". Progress is very slow with the level of funding we are seeing.

If Dimorphos was a solid rock, though, there wouldn't be anywhere for the energy to go but into the asteroid. The shrapnel from the impact would have to bounce backwards or sideways, which would just add to the momentum along the approach vector.

My answer to this is always along these lines.

If you think the money spent on this mission (experiment, etc.) Should be spent on real problems, you as an individual, should lead by example. Do you like professional sports? All the money paid to pro athletes should be used for real problems.

Do you enjoy a morning cup of coffee? This is a 10+Billion dollar industry. All that money should be used for real problems.

How much do you spend on alcohol? How about your lawn? I could go on.

If you aren't willing to give up these basically useless things, why should I be willing to give up on the advancement of science.

Which in the end is why you don't live in a cave, or die of an infected toenail, and have a 60 inch TV that you can watch basketball on. (Which is basically grown men playing keep away in their underwear)

I thought the moon didn't rotate relative to earth...

I think they were expecting Dimorphos to be a lot less squishy than it turned out. Instead of hitting a rock, the spacecraft struck a rubble pile, and was able to penetrate enough to dump most of its energy into Dimorphos rather than just dumping it onto Dimorphos.

How do we create an existential threat to Astrology next?

A lot more than 10 years. Well need probably a million satellites at least in LEO for amateur astronomy to actually be affected

I remember in the headlines after the impact everybody was amazed by how much more energy the probe delivered than predicted. Why were we so pessimistic? Isn't this a basic inelastic collision problem?

Not to mention the advance of machine learning and AI correction and image composition.

I think we'll discover much like we did with broadcasting that technology will allow us to do much more starting with much less.

We may have less sky time, sure, but we'll have better ability to make sense of what we do see

You have absolutely no idea who I am. Starlink is saving lives in Ukraine, providing high speed internet to native reservations in Canada, hooking up schools in Africa to the internet and provides a viable method for my local sugar shack to get faster than dialup speeds. So yeah, I am a fan. Constellations are going to happen so get over it. Your dislike of SpaceX seems to be motivated by Reddit Cool. SpaceX is taking humans to the moon for half the bid of their nearest competitor and are pushing spaceflight faster than any time since 1970. Starship has a 9 m diameter and can carry a 7 m mirror without the origami required for JW. The astronomy world is already looking at it. Lower cost to orbit and beyond will drop the price of space based instruments by an order of magnitude as mass stops being the constraining factor. There is zero chance it will take centuries to do anything short of FTL flight (which is probably impossible). In the last 120 years we moved from gliders to Artemis. It will not take centuries to take the next steps.

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Let's meet in 10 years and see how many of your pessimistic predictions came true. I think you underestimate how astute some scientists can be.

Sounds excessive. You can see no future where observations from the ground can continue?

If ground-based telescope are made unusable, astronomy will stagnate and will pretty much stop to exist. No one will be able to pursue a carer in astronomy when no research projects are possible. Even if space telescopes still exist and a fraction of ground-based telescopes are still usable, astronomy will not be sustainable. Astronomers are not doing science just for fun, they need money to survive and if astronomy cant provide this, they will be forced to move to another field.

Don't conflate my comments with political denial. The point of my responses:

• the sky is not falling (if you'll pardon the pun). Astronomers - professional and amateur (I count myself among the latter) - continue to operate successfully, what with the tools that are available now to ameliorate the effects of yet higher flying satellites (illuminated for longer periods) and aircraft (illuminated at all hours of the night).

• Truly global high speed, low latency internet has huge benefits on society, from providing access to remote communities, to assisting those defending their lands. Even without considering the impossibility of global mobile operation otherwise, there's no other kind of system capable of such ubiquitous coverage.

• a longer term/fuzzier point - beyond terrestrial mitigations, space based observatories are and will be supplementing ground-based telescopes. The technologies that make constellations cost effective will no doubt feed into making more space-borne instruments feasible.

I've seen it written that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, etc don't own the sky, and this is certainly true. However, neither do astronomers. Constellations are beyond the point of proving their dramatic worth, so they're here regardless of opinion. Observatories and constellation operators will work together and cooperate because there's no alternative.

you're still going to see this one: WE SHOULD BE USING THAT MONEY FOR REAL PROBLEMS!

"People like you...huh. That is a very loaded phrase. What kind of people are "like" me."

People that superficially like science, but in reality have no idea how it actually works behind the scenes. They only like to see the latest pictures and results from Hubble or JWST. They are a fan of Elon Musk and SpaceX just because they think it's cool. I am not saying you are like this, but this is the impression I get from these people that are blindly in favor of satellites constellations.

"Space telescopes are currently orders of magnitude more expensive. Where will they be in 30 years?"

Yes. Space materials are necessarily more expensive than material you can use on the ground. They need to survive much harsher conditions, under no maintenance, with limited possibilities to troubleshoot problems, and have stringent constraints on size and weight. Space telescopes will always be much more expensive than ground based telescopes.

"Nobody suggested to move all of astronomy to space (strawman alert). But if the article is right maybe a huge chunk has to."

"People" say all the time that we need to move astronomy to space. It doesn't matter if they mean 100% of telescopes, or 90%. The effect is the same, they are proposing a solution that is completely non viable.

"We are centuries away from any given technology? And you get these dates how?"

It took NASA 20 years to develop JWST. At a cost of 10 billion dollars. And this is a 6-meter diameter telescope. The next generation flagship space observatory is planned to be a 6 to 10-meter telescope that will launch in the mid 2040s at a cost similar to JWST. To rival the resolution capabilities of ground-based telescopes, we would need to build a 30-meter space telescope. Thinking that we are on the brink of achieving this is completely illusory.

I'd just make it Zulu Time. World already runs on going up or down a few time zones.

Fear not. Our Chinese friends will provide an associate for each Space-X satellite that will ensure that each is well behaved and causes no problems. Or they will be obliterated, and there will be many more objects to track.

The site doesn't really say anything interesting. You can't see them with the naked eye and they don't get close enough to be of concern. Here is a list of NEO approaches.

edit: imgur version of site

To head off the usual flood of identical comments that seem to come up every single time this mission's mentioned: no, there is no possibility, zero, none whatsoever, that Dimorphos will somehow fly out of its orbit and hit Earth (or any other planet). It ain't gonna happen, that's known for certain, stop reflex-fretting about it.

Why are you so keen to downplay the effects of these satellites constellations? Astronomers are trying so hard to warm the public but people simply choose to ignore them and choose to believe that it's not really a problem and that we will easily mitigate the satellites. It reminds me of the climate change debate, where scientists tried for decades to warm the public of this danger, but people simply ignored them, and now that it is becoming mainstream to accept climate change it is too late. Of course satellites constellations are not at the same level of threat as climate change, but the same logic applies. In fact, I suspect there is a great care of astronomy institutions and the writers of these articles you linked to seem "moderate" on this issue, otherwise people would immediately think they are crazy and would promptly ignore the issue. Exactly like what happens with climate change. So stop choosing to believe that everything is okay when it isn't. Satellites constellations are a huge deal and anyone that cares about science should be alarmed by them.

People like you...huh. That is a very loaded phrase. What kind of people are "like" me.

Space telescopes are currently orders of magnitude more expensive. Where will they be in 30 years?

Nobody suggested to move all of astronomy to space (strawman alert). But if the article is right maybe a huge chunk has to.

We are centuries away from any given technology? And you get these dates how?

Site is blocked in Europe. What's does it say? How close? Should we not look up or Don't Panic?

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