Trying to edit a stupid FCC comment on Yet Another Fucking Stupid Orbital Data Center (fuck you, Blue Origin) and I need to go outside and rage-scream for a while.
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Oh my god the "PUBLIC INTEREST" section is a giant love fest over all the things that AI isn't actually doing. Don't worry guys, if you launch data centers into orbit, they are way greener! There's always solar power in space! Please just ignore all the rocket exhaust, ablation products, and shit hitting the ground... Also the fact that data centers in space are almost certainly physically impossible...
@sundogplanets The only spaceship with the resources to run a data center is the one we all live on and we're not even very good at it here where there's easy maintenance, somewhere to put the heat, ready power supply and bandwidth.
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@sundogplanets Aren't there treaties that limit what can be put up there? Why not?
@tadbithuman @sundogplanets
the Outer Space Treaty (1967) is the closest thing; and because negotiating international treaties is hard -
That was the Narrative, now on to the Technical Annex. Whoopee.
Ok, so they want 300-1,000 satellites per plane, separated by 5-10km, ranging from 500-1,800km altitude. All in sun-synchronous. Like I said, super crowded.
There's a bunch of info about spectrum use, I will leave this to my radio colleagues to interpret. (dBW/m^2/MHz units... flux, I guess? Eeek.) It's probably bad.
ORBITAL DEBRIS MITIGATION this part will be the most "fun"
But a reminder that they asked for a waiver for their debris plan, so I guess that this is just... for funsies?
Here's the first and only information I've seen about the satellite sizes. They will be bigger than 10cm, so they will be easily tracked! No shit!! A fucking data center needs to be bigger than 10cm! What useful information!!
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Blue Origin wants 51,600 satellites, all in sun-synchronous orbits. That means they'll follow the terminator line around the Earth and be sunlit ALWAYS. They want to distribute them between 500-1,800 km altitude, which means some of them will be sunlit and visible all the time. Fanfuckingtastic.
This is also the exact same set of orbits that both SpaceX and Starcloud want. Sun-synchronous orbits are about to get ridiculously crowded.
@sundogplanets
some of my favourite satellites use(d) that orbit (WISE; SPHEREx) - it's great for surveyors -
> Sun-synchronous orbits are about to get ridiculously crowded.
True, but there is good news. I know you want to hear good news, right? The _relative_ velocities between all these sun-synchronous satellites will be small, so the intra-orbit contribution to the Kessler syndrome will be close to zero. Won't help a lot, because of all those satellites in other orbits...
@sundogplanets BTW do the documents address the cooling problem?
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ORBITAL DEBRIS MITIGATION this part will be the most "fun"
But a reminder that they asked for a waiver for their debris plan, so I guess that this is just... for funsies?
Here's the first and only information I've seen about the satellite sizes. They will be bigger than 10cm, so they will be easily tracked! No shit!! A fucking data center needs to be bigger than 10cm! What useful information!!
Wouldn't it be fun if they were plain Raspberry Pis with little solar panels attached and a little parabolic?
So cute!
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ORBITAL DEBRIS MITIGATION this part will be the most "fun"
But a reminder that they asked for a waiver for their debris plan, so I guess that this is just... for funsies?
Here's the first and only information I've seen about the satellite sizes. They will be bigger than 10cm, so they will be easily tracked! No shit!! A fucking data center needs to be bigger than 10cm! What useful information!!
To nobody's surprise, they will burn all their satellites up in the atmosphere, because that's what all the cool kids do. They don't actually say their operating lifetimes anywhere. But if they're 5 years like Starlink, then that's a bit more than one satellite burned up per hour.
And will they burn up completely? Well, they say they'll use the same NASA debris model to assess that said that the SpaceX Crew Dragon trunk would burn up. So I'm not worried at all!!
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Oh another one too: Please don't ask us about our debris mitigation plan because the "satellite design is currently being matured" (in other words, they have no fucking clue what the satellites will actually look like or how they will work).
Oh yet another: we totally can't upload our orbital parameter date because the FCC's web form is too crappy! (This part I actually believe. The FCC's website blows.) But come on guys, no orbits?
Oh yeah, didn't submit to the ITU yet either. Of course.
@sundogplanets my "please don't ask me about my debris mitigation plan" shirt is raising a lot of questions i had hoped would be avoided by wearing the shirt
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To nobody's surprise, they will burn all their satellites up in the atmosphere, because that's what all the cool kids do. They don't actually say their operating lifetimes anywhere. But if they're 5 years like Starlink, then that's a bit more than one satellite burned up per hour.
And will they burn up completely? Well, they say they'll use the same NASA debris model to assess that said that the SpaceX Crew Dragon trunk would burn up. So I'm not worried at all!!
"Blue Origin will take all feasible steps to reduce the probability of collision by at least 1.5 orders of magnitude for any collision risk above a threshold which will be no higher than 1E-5" I'm an orbital debris expert and I'm not sure I can parse this sentence. But I'm sure it'll be fine!!
They say they'll get the collision prob down to 1 in 1000 for any periods of non-maneuverability. With 51,000 sats and a million more from SpaceX, these are great odds! (...of a collision)
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Oh another one too: Please don't ask us about our debris mitigation plan because the "satellite design is currently being matured" (in other words, they have no fucking clue what the satellites will actually look like or how they will work).
Oh yet another: we totally can't upload our orbital parameter date because the FCC's web form is too crappy! (This part I actually believe. The FCC's website blows.) But come on guys, no orbits?
Oh yeah, didn't submit to the ITU yet either. Of course.
@sundogplanets This reads suspiciously as 'we have no plan, so please give us permission for this epic idea'. -
"Blue Origin will take all feasible steps to reduce the probability of collision by at least 1.5 orders of magnitude for any collision risk above a threshold which will be no higher than 1E-5" I'm an orbital debris expert and I'm not sure I can parse this sentence. But I'm sure it'll be fine!!
They say they'll get the collision prob down to 1 in 1000 for any periods of non-maneuverability. With 51,000 sats and a million more from SpaceX, these are great odds! (...of a collision)
@sundogplanets 51 collisions! Let's go! -
Wouldn't it be fun if they were plain Raspberry Pis with little solar panels attached and a little parabolic?
So cute!
There is a group called Lonestar Data Holdings that claims to offer "orbital data centers", by which they mean that they once paid to have an extra drive bolted on the side of a spacecraft used for something else.
But that is not what the current flood of "data centers in space" scams is about.
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"Blue Origin will take all feasible steps to reduce the probability of collision by at least 1.5 orders of magnitude for any collision risk above a threshold which will be no higher than 1E-5" I'm an orbital debris expert and I'm not sure I can parse this sentence. But I'm sure it'll be fine!!
They say they'll get the collision prob down to 1 in 1000 for any periods of non-maneuverability. With 51,000 sats and a million more from SpaceX, these are great odds! (...of a collision)
No mention of atmospheric pollution, of course, because the FCC doesn't give a shit about that. With SpaceX's 5 Starlinks a day a few months ago, we were well above natural infall rates of most metals, so 1 (presumably) gigantic satellite per hour will be a lot worse than that.
My colleagues and I wrote a bit about using the atmosphere as a satellite crematorium here, and it's bad: https://theconversation.com/a-new-space-race-could-turn-our-atmosphere-into-a-crematorium-for-satellites-276366
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"Blue Origin will take all feasible steps to reduce the probability of collision by at least 1.5 orders of magnitude for any collision risk above a threshold which will be no higher than 1E-5" I'm an orbital debris expert and I'm not sure I can parse this sentence. But I'm sure it'll be fine!!
They say they'll get the collision prob down to 1 in 1000 for any periods of non-maneuverability. With 51,000 sats and a million more from SpaceX, these are great odds! (...of a collision)
@sundogplanets I don't study orbital risk, but I do study cybersecurity risk, and a probability without a timeframe is a sure sign of sloppy thinking.
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"Blue Origin will take all feasible steps to reduce the probability of collision by at least 1.5 orders of magnitude for any collision risk above a threshold which will be no higher than 1E-5" I'm an orbital debris expert and I'm not sure I can parse this sentence. But I'm sure it'll be fine!!
They say they'll get the collision prob down to 1 in 1000 for any periods of non-maneuverability. With 51,000 sats and a million more from SpaceX, these are great odds! (...of a collision)
@sundogplanets What's more, is the 1e-5 the starting point, after which probability will be reduced by "at least 1.5 orders of magnitude" or the result of that reduction?
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@sundogplanets What's more, is the 1e-5 the starting point, after which probability will be reduced by "at least 1.5 orders of magnitude" or the result of that reduction?
@sundogplanets As I'm sure we both tell our students, if you can't explain it clearly, that's probably evidence that you're not thinking about it clearly.
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ORBITAL DEBRIS MITIGATION this part will be the most "fun"
But a reminder that they asked for a waiver for their debris plan, so I guess that this is just... for funsies?
Here's the first and only information I've seen about the satellite sizes. They will be bigger than 10cm, so they will be easily tracked! No shit!! A fucking data center needs to be bigger than 10cm! What useful information!!
@sundogplanets they will *start* larger than 10cm!
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To nobody's surprise, they will burn all their satellites up in the atmosphere, because that's what all the cool kids do. They don't actually say their operating lifetimes anywhere. But if they're 5 years like Starlink, then that's a bit more than one satellite burned up per hour.
And will they burn up completely? Well, they say they'll use the same NASA debris model to assess that said that the SpaceX Crew Dragon trunk would burn up. So I'm not worried at all!!
@sundogplanets There is real nuance here. Systems like SpaceX’s Starlink are designed to mostly burn up on re-entry, but models are probabilistic—not guarantees.
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No mention of atmospheric pollution, of course, because the FCC doesn't give a shit about that. With SpaceX's 5 Starlinks a day a few months ago, we were well above natural infall rates of most metals, so 1 (presumably) gigantic satellite per hour will be a lot worse than that.
My colleagues and I wrote a bit about using the atmosphere as a satellite crematorium here, and it's bad: https://theconversation.com/a-new-space-race-could-turn-our-atmosphere-into-a-crematorium-for-satellites-276366
Oh hey, there's an ASTRONOMY MITIGATIONS section!! All of the collective astronomy yelling and screaming is working!!!
...oh wait it's all total bullshit, because they don't actually have anything close to a satellite design or even a size. Three whole sentences at the very end of the document!! They care so much about saving the night sky and all of astronomy research!
And with that, I desperately need to go take a walk in the woods.
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@sundogplanets As I'm sure we both tell our students, if you can't explain it clearly, that's probably evidence that you're not thinking about it clearly.
@adamshostack @sundogplanets Sadly in this case I suspect it's more "if you're not explaining it clearly it's because explaining it clearly looks *really* bad", since these are folks who absolutely know their stuff (at least legally and organizationally) and any weird lack of clarity is most likely intentional.
