Beyond LEO requires more fuel and a bigger rocket to launch, meaning more cost. It creates greater latency due to the greater distance. Also, they want these satellites to have a 5 year lifespan because terrestrial ISPs and cellular providers and datacentre operators are continually upgrading their hardware. So they will probably want to de-orbit and replace them anyway, because moving them to a graveyard orbit will result in the graveyard getting very full very quickly.

It also causes issues when satellites malfunction, because they won't naturally de-orbit in a practical amount of time. Failure to reach the intended orbit, resulting in an uncontrollable satellite, is one of the most common modes.

My browser shreds cookies as soon as I leave a site in most cases, as well as all other site date. These days the tracking works based on multiple signals, so even if you delete the cookies, if the IP address and browser signals like user agent and screen resolution match, they will re-associate that identity with you. You need to screw with a lot of metrics to throw them off.

In my country a spam lawsuit against 50 people where only one of them is possibly "guilty" of a civil offence with a relatively small financial loss isn't going to fly. They have largely given up suing people here because such speculative invoicing scams tend not to stand up to judicial scrutiny. At best an IP address identifies a subscriber, who may not be the person who downloaded the file, and who isn't under any legal obligation to help determine who it was, and who can't be held liable as there are no reasonable means for them to prevent such "abuse".

I didn't say no rocket launches. We just need to evaluate the impact, and take steps to prevent damage. We need to know what is in the satellites and what the effect of them burning up is.

I wouldn't say they are doing it wrong, I'd say that there is a fundamental conflict between privacy and anti-bot measures.

For privacy reasons I don't want a unique IP address. I want a shared one, and if it's IPv6 I want it to rotate frequently. That's one of the reasons why I use a VPN. ISPs probably also like it because it means that without extensive logging, for which there is no business justification, they can't identify who downloaded some movie that the MAFIAA et. al. want to sue over.

But of course the anti-bot features would love everyone to have a fixed IP address assigned to their person. Failing that, they seem to prefer to just mass block shared IP addresses and force you to log in.

Stuff burning up does not disappear. It becomes part of the upper atmosphere. Before there were so few things burning up that nobody really bothered considering it, but now we are going to be having tens of thousands of satellites re-entering every year, it needs to be looked into.

I find IPv6 is worse than CGNAT for these anti-bot measures. YouTube is a good example. With IPv6 enabled all I ever see is "log in to prove you are not a bot". With it disabled and sitting behind CGNAT, I can usually watch some videos.

It already has been making false positive matches. There have been several stories about people randomly accosted as they entered stores like B&M, with the security staff claiming they were criminals and often breaking the law themselves in the process.

Because the database is shared by several different chains, it's something that you can't ignore if it falsely flags you. You need to get them to remove your face from it, and ideally claim some compensation for the misuse of your biometric data. The baseline is £250, but I'd be looking for at least £750 due to the hassle and embarrassment caused.

And as usual they claim that China is only capable of stealing and copying. It's always the same mistake, and the same outcome.

It's because they think they can launch capacity faster than they can built it on Earth. Instead of dealing with local government, grid energy supply availability, water and so on, they can just launch it into orbit. It's all about being the first to deploy the compute capacity and cornering the market.

Of course it also creates lots of business for SpaceX, so a lot of it could be a Hyperloop-style scam.

Thing is they need to deal with the pollution it will create (stuff burning up on re-entry doesn't just vanish), frequency allocations for the comms, and the fact that now everyone wants their own 50,000 satellite constellation in those prime orbits.

The technical hurdles are relatively trivial in comparison.

Yeah, no naturally it was modded down. There are some real luddites around here.

Sure, but thinking further ahead, e.g. the plan for Starship is to land vertically on the moon and then lift off again. The renders they have produced show landing struts, presumably derived from the booster ones.

The Chinese lander shown off a few years ago looks to be more like the Apollo LM and planned Soviet LK, so they don't need that capability to hit their "before 2030" goal.

The military implications are obvious. Think Ukraine. If you suspect the enemy is trying to infiltrate on a dark night along several kilometers of frontline, you light up the scene while launching a bunch of low-cost FPV drones, and those infiltrators are about to have a bad day.

You *can* spot infiltrators in the dark with IR cameras, but it requires much more expensive drones and isn't usually as effective, hence the preference for night operations. Plus, there's IR camouflage, with varying degrees of success. But it usually makes you stand out like a sore thumb under illumination (you're basically wearing a tent).

Presumably that's why they envision having 50,000 of them. One alone won't do much, dozens or even hundreds of them all reflecting at the same spot...

Depends, is the amount of solar it generates at night going to offset more heating than it causes?

This is a small prototype, not a full-scale mirror.

Also, ignoring that, pretending light brighter than the full moon is useless is... silly? For generating power, sure, but for illumination, it absolutely is not.