The article doesn't really point out the remarkable part about this, which is that it's a privately funded satellite. This really shows a change in the space economy.

Granted the barriers to entry have been lowered somewhat... But privately owned satellites have been around since the first commercial telecommunications birds back in the 1960's.

While true, it kind of misses my (perhaps poorly and incompletely expressed) point. Information (such as how to use the slide rule in your example) is nice - but you still need the technology to produce the slide rule (or flint knapped spearpoint). Information is great for winning trivia contests, but survival depends on technology.

Sorry for derailing this, but how many people still know the "ancient arts"? You know, the stuff that we used to need before technology took over?

 
The "ancient arts" are technology as well. It's all technology at least as far back as the first knapped flint spearpoint.

WHAT? Having to do all the heavy work themselves? Not getting free advertising from Google's algorithm? Actually having to pay to make make their content available?

Are you mad?

I'm not saying there's not problems with what support Youtube offers content creators... But the value of what they do offer is indisputable. And the grandparent illustrates that.

Progress is not Soyuz. It's two different space vehicles

Yes... and no. Progress is a highly modified Soyuz with a very different front end. Otherwise two share a large number of subsystems, and in particular the Orbital Module (where the cooling system is located) is virtually identical.

What the fuck is this rush to app-ify everything even when its clearly impractical (bugs, phones can be lost/stolen, not everyone even amongst the young has or wants a smartphone) when there are simpler solutions that Just Work?

Keys and wallets can be stolen, lost, or misplaced just like phones.

Not that those other systems were simpler either... Key management on the scale of something like a university is a pretty good sized job all on it's own. Ditto the cashiers in school cafeterias. It's not that they Just Worked, it's that you're either clueless about the amount of invisible infrastructure, or it just never occurred to you because it was Always There.

If the US and Canada would take similar steps, it would finally allow the Free World to get the hell out of the Middle East and watch the hate mongers slaughter each other while we eat popcorn.

Setting aside the fact that there's more to the free world than the US and Canada... The Middle East isn't a majority provider of oil to the US and hasn't been as long as I've been watching. (Since around the turn of the century.) The vast majority of our oil comes from Canada, Mexico, and various South American sources.

Oil is not just energy. If you could produce the equivalent megajoules overnight with renewables, you can not make plastic, fertilizer, medical equipment, rubber, fake leather, and a whole unbelievable list of other things without oil.

Petroleum is used for those things because of it's vast array of ready-made molecules to swap around like Legos... But it's not the only source of such molecules. There's any number of plant based materials, and if worse comes to worse you can synthesize them from raw elements.

Petroleum is neither magic, not irreplaceable. It's just cheap and conveniently available compared to other sources.

it is also not a long-term problem and will quickly return to normal because that's just how chemistry works.

O.o
 
No, the dead ecosystem will not "quickly" return to normal. It will take years, if not decades... If it ever does return to normal.

They're in LEO, so the chance they end up as 'space debris' is extremely low. Once they reach end of life, they'll just de-orbit and burn up.

That's... not how this works.
 
Any satellite that loses the capability to de-orbit becomes space debris for the length of time it takes them to de-orbit. Right now, they're at an altitude where it will take 5-8 years for them to naturally decay. The 1200km constellation though... orbital lifetime at that altitude is measured in centuries.

And keep in mind, Starlink isn't the only planned constellation.

Starlink satellites are only visible around twilight or dawn.

That's true of the current constellation - you only lose 10-20% of your potential observing time. But they're the low altitude fleet - there's more coming and they'll be higher up and thus visible much deeper into the night.
 
Not to mention Starlink isn't the only constellation being built out...

I think, however, we're at a tipping point. Instead of "whining" about Starlink getting in the way, astronomers should hope that SpaceX becomes profitable on a level like Facebook or Google... Just imagine if it took only a fraction of Webb to bring hardware into space.

*sigh*
 
That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.
 
Only a small fraction of Webb's $10 billion cost was launch and delivery. The vast majority of that was spent first developing the technology and then building the instruments... And developing and building sensitive precision instruments that must operate in one of the most hostile environments known to man will never be cheap, even if launch and delivery were free.

Imagine even multi millionaires having the means to deploy telescopes in space or on the far side of the moon that could be rented on an hourly basis like mainframes could back in the day. The more of them the cheaper it would be.

Once they're that cheap and common... Their scientific viability will be considerably diminished. Kinda like a one or two meter reflector is terrestrially nowadays. Not without scientific and educational value, but largely obsolescent. Nobody is going to win a Nobel prize with one, maybe a bachelor's degree.

Not sure why we keep having to point out inequalities

Because shitheads like yourself still exist - utter fucking mouthbreathing morons who think the only reason people are poor is because they make "poor choices" and "watch Netflix". And so long ignorant jackasses like yourself continue to exist, we'll keep pointing out the truth and hoping that eventually you'll learn.

(It's kind of ironic that the folks who bleat about learning and education are the same ones that refuse to learn and insist on remaining ignorant.)

Palomar was built as a private venture, with private funds

Utterly and completely irrelevant as it has no bearing on either your claim or my reply to it.
 

as an evolution over the previous generation of large telescopes

In other words, though irrelevant, it was just as the JWST is to the Hubble.
 

And they built a quarter-scale prototype before pulling the trigger on the real thing. And that prototype, being a functional 1.25m telescope, did some real science too in its day.

Completely and utterly irrelevant to either your claim or my reply to it.

Or, to put it more plainly, you're 0-3.

And Hubble is still cranking out good science too. Imagine if half the resources sunk into JWST had been used to make sure there were 2 or 3 Hubble clones floating up there now and for another 20 or 30 years.

I bet that sounds impressive to the ill-educated... But the educated grasp that JWST is emphatically not a Hubble replacement. They don't operate in the same wavelengths and they don't have the same science goals. They're not interchangeable.
 

A 25+ year start-to-ioc timeline is just about too long for any scientific or technical continuity considering that it is mid-career people initiating the work who almost certainly won't be around to see the result.

ROFL. The Palomar telescope took twenty years from conception to operational - and revolutionized astronomy when it did. By your idiotic standards it should have been abandoned mid-stream, even if it was started it the first place.