The space company of the celebrity CEO is screwing over astronomers with the placement of their satellites.

It isn’t a coincidence.

They want astronomers dependent on technologies that only the space company has, and you will have to pay a fee.

SpaceX

Elon Musk

SpaceX Satellites Are A Problem For Astronomers05:45

While eating al fresco with friends on a recent evening, Here & Now’s Peter O’Dowd saw a string of lights appear low in the night sky — one bright little dot after another zooming by above him.

He thought it was some kind of alien spacecraft invasion, but it turned out to be Elon Musk’s latest venture. Musk has launched nearly 2,000 low-orbit satellites into space to bring internet connectivity to remote areas.

But the constellation of Starlink satellites is alarming casual observers and professional astronomers. John Barentine, director of conservation for the International Dark-Sky Association, started thinking about the implications of having hundreds or thousands of satellites up in the sky at the same time after the first Starlink launch in May of 2019.

“In the next 10 years, we expect that the number of satellites orbiting the Earth will increase by more than an order of magnitude,” he says. “The Starlink program alone represents about 30,000 objects compared to the roughly 4,000 or so satellites that are in orbit around the Earth right now.”

The little moving lights show up in the images produced by telescopes, he says.

“If you’re observing a faint object in the distant universe and suddenly a satellite comes by, it sort of obliterates what you just saw,” he says. “It buries below this bright signal from the reflected sunlight the science data that you’re trying to get.”

Barentine co-authored a recent paper that found these satellites and small pieces of debris are making the night sky brighter. This could make astronomy a bit less efficient, he says.

“As you raise the background level of the night sky, you lower the contrast between the sky and the objects that we’re trying to see with the telescopes,” he says. “And so we have to expose longer to get the same amount of signal from these distant objects.”

In March of 2020, Musk predicted that Starlink won’t impact astronomy at all. If the satellites do impact the study of space, Musk said the company will “take corrective action.” – Source

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