Elon Musk-controlled satellite internet provider Starlink has told Brazil’s telecom regulator Anatel it will not comply with a court order to block social media platform X in the country until its local accounts are unfrozen.
Anatel confirmed the information to Reuters on Monday after its head Carlos Baigorri told Globo TV it had received a note from Starlink, which has more than 200,000 customers in Brazil, and passed it onto Brazil’s top court.
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes last week ordered all telecom providers in the country to shut down X, which is also owned by billionaire Musk, for lacking a legal representative in Brazil.
The move also led to the freezing of Starlink’s bank accounts in Brazil. Starlink is a unit of Musk-led rocket company SpaceX. The billionaire responded to the account block by calling Moraes a “dictator.”
the problem is starlink is actually a good thing, providing decent internet access to places that can’t get it otherwise. I think the thing to target is the clear collusion going on between companies in ostensibly unrelated industries to pressure a government into reversing a penalty on one of them.
Specifically because they are controlled by the same asshat. This is the same exact type of shit he does with stock manipulation and why he was eventually forced to buy Twitter. All his wealth has been generated by cheating and exploitation. I hope Brazil drops the hammer.
Compounding fines would be a nice touch. Then send in the lawyers to actually break the money free.
Putting up tens of thousands of extra objects into orbit that we now have to track and worry about collisions with other satellites is not a good thing.
Not to mention that their orbits degrades over time so they have to be continually replenished.
That comes at a huge cost which is highly subsidized by US tax payers.Hang on. Which subsidy are you saying Starlink is getting that is highly subsidized by US taxpayers? Starlink got rejected for the $900m broadband subsidy.
Note for clarity: Musk is an asshat.
That was indeed what I was thinking of. I didn’t realize it was rejected. My bad, and thanks for the letting me know!
The rockets that launch those satellites were developed using tax dollars.
Are you referring to the NASA contracts for Dragon cargo delivery flights to the ISS?
Also, each satelite that burns up upon re-entry isn’t just gone - it still introduces vaporized materials into the upper atmosphere.
Iirc they are harming the ozone layer.
They are far, far lower than the ozone layer.
You remember incorrectly.
Starlink satelites are about 341 miles above earth, on average. https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/starlink-everything-know-network-satellites-151511672.html
Ozone layer is 9-18 miles above earth’s surface. https://www.epa.gov/ozone-layer-protection/basic-ozone-layer-science
you remember incorrectly.
Well, I suppose that you are correct. Don’t I feel like an idiot.
Believe you mean far far lower than geosynchronous orbit. Which is not the ozone layer. Ozone is not particularly far. like… less than 20 miles. Geosync is like… 20k miles. While Low Earth Orbit is much closer to the ozone than to geosync, its still far past the ozone, around 300+ miles.
Where those vaporized materials end up kr the satellites themselves?
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In a lot of cases I would agree with you, but laying fiber optic cable through the Amazon in order to connect remote settlements is not feasible, starlink really does have a good use case there.
And ocean communication.
It’s amazingly clear none of these people have ever tried to use any of the existing Geostationary satellite data networks.
They are slow as shit. Not just by modern standards, by any standards. HughesNet is one of the remaining satellite Internet providers.
$50/mo gives you 50Mbps speeds, 100GB of “Priority Data”, whatever the fuck that is (probably your 50Mbps data, then it slows). And that price is only for a year, then it is $75/mo. They also love to tout a 30ms latency somehow, but that’s just a damned lie. Latency for a Geostationary satellite is around 500ms, or roughly the speed of light because that’s physics. So I have no idea where they think they’re getting 30ms, unless that’s only the additional latency they’re claiming AFTER it bounces off the satellite and reaches the ground to be routed to the internet on their end.
Starlink is a constellation of low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites, not geostationary satellites. That means that the ground station (i.e. subscriber equipment) talks to one satellite as it comes into view, and over time that satellite moves across the sky, and they switch to another satellite. This means the latency is highly variable as the distance changes, but at its lowest is much lower than a geostationary satellite since it is far closer.
I think they were talking about HughesNet the entire time. With the pricing, datacaps, and the latency lies. HughesNet does use geostationary satellites and has 600ms latency according to Wikipedia.
600ms is it’s absolute best under perfect conditions.
When do you need faster ocean communication, besides luxury? Nobody is owned fast internet on an environment-destroying luxury cruiseship.
Because cruise ships are the only thing not on the mainland. Certainly no cargo ships, research vessels, island nations, or anything else.
Ships should suffice with a 100 kB/s connection which already existed before Starlink. You don’t usually need to send tons of data.
Additionally, Starlink is currently only offered to a single island nation without submarine fibre-optic cable, the Easter Islands. Although they may get submarine fibre somewhere after 2026 anyways because that is when a new cable will be laid closeby.
Those speeds would be under ideal conditions, like sitting on land on a clear day with no weather.
It’s not about the raw speed honestly, but the machine latency and stability of the signal. Traditional GEO satellites need a pretty steady platform to maintain connection. The mobile capable dishes are usually less capable than fixed position ones because they need to be less directional to maintain a signal while moving. But in say rougher seas, the movement will be vastly different than a boat just sitting on a lake.
Starlink can compensate for this better because it’s designed to utilize multiple lower satellites simultaneously in view and a more omni-directional dish, alongside a signal that only needs to go to LEO. The difference between LEO and GEO or its is absolutely massive. The Starlink satellite constellation operates between 1/30 and 1/105 the distance of traditional GEO satellites. This means a latency of 25-35ms since they are so much lower. Lower latency will mean lower packet loss from instability which means higher throughout.
For a real world use case, look at the SpaceX landing ships. They originally used traditional GEO satellites for those video streams, and the motion and vibration from the rocket getting near caused total signal loss. Often signal loss for a white a while after the lending was over because the ship was still moving too much. After they switched to Starlink, I think I can remember maybe twice at the beginning where the signal cut for a second or so, and once they had a few launches to provide more consistent coverage and satellite redundancy, I can’t even remember the last time we lost a signal during a landing.
Real time video streams are essentially the worst use case for traditional satellite communication, and the differences between the network types of night and day.
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It’s less so “collusion” than it is “a billionaire brat using their obscene wealth and plethora of businesses to strong arm their way out of any accountability”. We can’t consider starlink a “good thing” because it will always be part of that, and any group or government relying on it to any degree should take note.
Nah, Starlink itself is bad, the intention is good.
what specifically is “bad” about it? I understand people are concerned about space junk, but it seems worth the benefit to me.
It’s wrecking astronomy already and we aren’t even at the peak of satellite constellations.
Wrecking is not really the right term.
It is causing work for astronomers, and wrecking very few older systems, but generally it is an issue you can work around. I.e. something temporary. What you usually see in my experience of the field is you have some of your work degraded by satellite streaks, which are about 2x more common since starlink, and you understandably complain at starlink. And then get around to coding up a solution to deal with the streaks, spend another few runs until it about works, and eventually forget this was ever a thing.
In more detail, the base issue is, that you are taking an image, with probably minutes or hours or days of exposure, and every satellite passing through that image is going to create a streak that does not represent a star. Naturally that is not good in most cases.
The classic approach here, because this issue has existed since before starlink satellites, is to - depending on frequency and exposure length and your methodology - either retake the entire shot, or throw out at least the frames with the satellite on it, manually.
The updated approach is to use info about satellite positions to automatically block out the very small angle of the sky around them that their light can be scattered to by the atmosphere, and remove this before summing that frame into your final exposure. Depending on methodology, it might also be feasible to automatically throw away frames with any satellite on them, or you can count up which parts of the image were blocked for how long in total and append a tiny bit of exposure only to them at the end.
To complicate this, I think more modern complaints are not about the permanent constellation satellites but those freshly deployed, that are still raising their orbits. Simply because their positions are not as easy to determine, since their orbits are changing. So you need to further adapt your system to specifically detect these chains of satellites and also block them out of your exposures.
The issue here is that you need to create this system that deals with satellite data. And then you need that control over the frames in your exposure, which naturally does not match how exposure used to work in the olden days of film, but to my knowledge does work on all “modern” telescopes.
My knowledge here is limited but I think this covers about 30-40 years of optical telescopes, which should largely be all optical ground based telescopes relevant today. Further, you probably do need to replace electronics in older telescopes, since they were not built to allow this selective blocking, only to interrupt the exposure.
In summary, not affected are narrow fov modern optical telescopes, and in general telescopes operating far from visual frequencies.
Affected with some extra work, would be some older narrow (but not very narrow) fov telescopes, as you now have to make them dodge satellites or turn off shortly, when previously you could have just thrown away the entire exposure in the rarer cases you caught a satellite. This would be software only (not that software is free).
Modern wide fov telescopes might need hardware upgrades or just software upgrades to recover frames with streaks on them.
Old wide fov telescopes may be taken out of commission or at least have their effective observation times cut shorter by needing to pass out on more and more exposure time over satellites in the frame.
It is a problem, yes, but in my understanding one that can be overcome, and is causing the main annoyance and majority of its issues while the number of satellites is increasing, not after they have been increased.
I don’t know of a single area of ground based astronomy that couldn’t be done with even a million satellites in leo.
Sure, professionals can work around it, but for amateurs it fucking sucks.
Its also not just optical astronomy either, they shit out RF on the reserved radio astronomy frequencies too.
Yeah, for amateurs it’ll be a while longer for this tech to become easily available.
Though It is also fundamentally fixable, you can take the output of your sensor and apply the same sort of logic to it as professional large telescopes. The blocking spots will be larger since the telescope will not correct for atmospheric distortions and likely be in a less favorable spot, but still you can do far better than throwing out entire frames or even entire exposures.
It is ofc a much much larger ask for hobby astronomers to deal with this initial wild-west software mess of figuring all of that out.
As for the RF mess, this is the first time I hear of that. It seems honestly kinda odd to me, we have a lot of frequency control regulations globally and I have heard SpaceX go through the usual frequency allocation proceedings. A violation of that would be easy to show and should get them in serious trouble quickly. Do you have any source on that?
Its not radio emissions necessarily, but general EMI, which isn’t illegal. But we’re talking about such sensitive instruments looking for incredibly faint signals. While the noise from 1 satellite might be insignificant, the combined effects of 100,000+ of all the planned constellations is going to be brutal to the noise floor. It’s the same deal with optical astronomy. Bright spots are an issue, but they are also going to increase the general diffuse brightness (noise) of the night sky, which is already reaching ‘problem’ threshold with the current number of satellites.
https://www.aanda.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202346374 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-023-01904-2#Sec2
Maybe to add a bit of general context to this, I am not an astronomer but I work in an adjacent field. So I hear a lot of astronomers talk about their work both in private and public.
You don’t really hear them talk about satellites often. What from what I gather really wrecks astronomy is light pollution, which has been doubling every few years for a while now and is basically caging optical astronomy to a select few areas.
The worst thing for astronomy in the last century has probably, ironically, been the invention of the LED.
The satellite streak thing is probably a minor point, where newspapers caught some justified ranting of astronomers and blew it way out of proportion.
If I had to choose between global high speed internet access, and ground based astronomy, I’d pick the Internet every time. I’d completely blot out the sky forever if that’s what it took.
We don’t need ground-based astronomy to learn about the universe, I’d rather encourage more space-based astronomy. Or build some observatories on the moon if you really want to build on a solid space body.
However, Starlink is a for profit company run by Elon Musk. I don’t really want them doing it, because they’re not going to provide unlimited global Internet to everyone. So as the guy said, the idea is good, but Starlink is bad, although it is currently the only such option.
Do you know what the price difference is between a ground based observatory and a space based one? We are talking orders of magnitude in differences. It took an international alliance just to build the ISS in low Earth orbit. We are decades away from being able to build anything on the moon, and we definitely won’t be building visual telescopes there.
Can it be a good thing while it’s controlled by someone so clearly looking to exploit it’s influence for personal gain?