I'm trying to rage-write an article about all the completely awful, useless, polluting, dangerous shit that companies are proposing to launch into orbit and I can't even tell what's fake and what's real on these fucking techbro websites anymore. It's all so fucking ludicrous.
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@sundogplanets it seems like all these space ventures live in the same no-man's-land occupied by stuff like Elon Musk's hyperloop or his brain-chip ambitions: it's hard to tell the degree to which they actually hope to achieve anything substantial vs. have some sort of grand tentpole projects always going, pretexts for hoovering up investment dollars
@sundogplanets
No wonder they are not concerned with AI hallucinations given they themselves hallucinate far more strongly.
@sundogplanets The same tech bros ducking up space and astronomy are also ducking up everything in my industry (open source software), with their thieving AI bullshit generators, covering us in generated manure in vast amounts, while also taking no care of software reliability or security.
It's such a shitshow, which will get worser before it might all fall apart.
Your goat and aurora photos, and everybody else creating fabulous photos and art of nature and animals is what's keeping me going.
@sundogplanets as the t-shirt says 'imaginary gardens with real frogs in them.'
Like this shit: https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/27/meta-inks-deal-for-solar-power-at-night-beamed-from-space/
Don't worry guys, the CEO says you can stare right into the infrared beam and it's totally safe! I trust him, don't you?
(How you transmit usable amounts of power with a beam that's so diffuse that you can look at it I have no fucking idea.)
@sundogplanets Somebody was doing coke while reading Gerard O’Neill’s HIGH FRONTIER.
@sundogplanets Genuinely that’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard. 😂
Someday I hope we see serious studies on how having absurd amounts of wealth and influence literally destroys people’s brains.
It's astonishing the ways corporations continue to find ways to damage the Earth.
@sundogplanets My understanding is that this can be done right (safely) -- but no way do I trust Meta to do anything right.
Or this shit: https://www.cnn.com/science/space-forge-factory-semiconductors-spc
I guess factories in orbit are already a thing? Tiny factories, for now. Which then have to drop their precious cargo back through the atmosphere somehow and recover it? How does this make any sense economically at all?
@sundogplanets Orbital factories are at least hypothetically useful. Crystal formation is affected by gravity, which limits manufacturing of a whole class of materials. Microgravity crystal formation allows for more precise process control. Things like silicon nanowafers for computing are basically the most expensive materials by weight of any manufacturable substances on earth, so there is more tolerance for expensive manufacturing processes than any other class of material.
It still doesn't make any sense economically because it's not just building a supremely expensive supply chain for something we already have, it's only worth doing for the development of new materials, which then would have to go through decades of research and product development to design a marketable product that is likely only slightly better than existing products in a few metrics, for orders of magnitude more cost.
@sundogplanets Theoretically, at least, microgravity might allow the production of materials that can’t be made in 1G. I’m pretty sure some small-scale feasibility studies have been done but can’t recall any smashing successes. Your point about the economics is dead-on. The material produced is going to have to be incredibly valuable in its application to be worth it. And yes, it’s a 1970s-80s scifi staple.
@sundogplanets this one only makes sense to me if they think they're selling the output to future space assembly factories. who knows what scifi they've been reading and want to get out ahead of!
These companies remembers me the Panama scndals at the end of 1800:
@sundogplanets I don't know enough about materials science to know if this is true. To me it sounds like hype to draw in investor money.
Or this shit: https://spacedaily.com/sd-n-nasa-backs-interlunes-2028-bid-to-mine-helium-3-from-the-moon/
The Moon's gravity is much weaker than Earth's so it'll be easy to accidentally launch rocks into Moon-escape orbits, making the Earth-Moon trip even more hazardous than it is already. Fun!
@sundogplanets As an environmentalist and hobbyist astronomer, I’m truly baffled by the attitude those companies seem to harbor toward space pollution. It’s just not a concern for them *at all*.
@sundogplanets Well, at least they got through an article about lunar He3 without going off on some fusion energy tangent.
Checking; that grant is for a system to measure volatile gases in lunar regolith in situ.
Nothing about mining the Moon for helium-3.
The media coverage remains appalling.
@michael_w_busch Yeah, the bad journalism is not helping me decide what's real and what's not...
Or THIS shit which is really shit: https://harvardtechnologyreview.com/2025/09/05/the-future-of-energy-unlocking-the-potential-of-space-based-solar-power/
Many companies are looking at different ways to do this (like the stare-into-the-IR-beam company above). All of them have huge safety, tech, and/or feasibility issues.
I would love to see the business case for something like that. Especially given that we can generate solar electricity so easily right here on the ground.
@sleepy62 @sundogplanets for starters the business case is on the moon and Mars. Also it enables solar power during night too.
We already have have solar power at night in the form of storage and grid interconnections.
My point is it is almost certainly going to be cheaper to build out storage and/or high voltage grid interconnect between sunny and not sunny places than it is to build anything remotely financially viable in space.
@sleepy62 @sundogplanets there's also a limit on how much solar power can exist on country like Japan without risking local food production.
In addition out of control climate change might put terrestrial solar plants in risk due to worsening storms and increasing hailstorms.
@sundogplanets
Every time I see those tech boy hallucinations I want to yell at them that combining coke and booze results in serious brain damage.
Saddest part is that they have access to enough money to actually cause real serious harm
But of course nothing beats SpaceX's drunk teenager scifi novel of an FCC filing about how we need AI data centres in orbit to ascend into Kardashev civilization land. Which the FCC took totally seriously, opened for public comment in 4 days (record-short time!) https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-26-113A1.pdf
and the FCC will probably approve despite a couple thousand comments from the public and at least two petitions to deny opposing it. Fuckers.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@sundogplanets/115345346648445621
A million satellites have obvious consequences, but even one can cause huge amounts of damage. Reflect Orbital, possibly simultaneously the most useless and damaging company ever to exist, which I have ranted about many times, and will continue to rant as their FCC filing is also likely to be approved despite a couple thousand comments against it from the general public and at least 2 formal petitions to deny. I really really hate this company a lot.
@sundogplanets
What bothers me, is that in matters which effect all of mankind, like the millions of satellites Starlink wants to shoot into orbit or what Reflect Orbital is trying to do, nobody but the FCC seems to have a say in this.
Shouldn't such things be regulated by a global organization?
I want to see companies that promise to use a handful of well-tested, ethically built, perfectly functioning satellites with decades-long operating lifetimes to do something that benefits the vast majority of humanity. Why can't we have more proposals like that?
@sundogplanets <gestures at Hughes Communications>
<gestures at DirecTV>
<gestures at the vultures at SkyTerra>
<gestures at EchoStar>
@sundogplanets Planned obsolescence is rarely not a moneymaker for the planners, and up there was low-earth orbit, minding its own business, not making adolescent-minded billionaires into adolescent-minded trillionaires.
@sundogplanets because cheap crap faster and faster has been the latest craze since the 70's.
- Clothes are crap and don't last for years.
- Kitchen blades are crap, if nothing else the plastic handles or the planned obsolescence side paint starts to crack.
- Home appliances don't last for 20 years and don't have 10 year warranty by default.
The list goes on and on.
Oh. This is orbital enshittification.
Shit.
@sundogplanets In the 2010s everybody got a social media account and now there are no more offline humans to focus your onboarding efforts on. These funds have existed for 30 years by growing cloud services. But now it's just the inert bottom of the ocean where there is no more whale carcass left.
So they try to keep the lights on by absorbing whole large infrastructure sectors. It's not that they have anything useful to offer space. It's that space has government money that is useful to them.
@sundogplanets
🙏🙏🙏 thanks to voice all this out, this topic should raise much more voices and struggles about it. There's so much to do with all the mess being done in this world. Why are we letting multi-billionnaires ruin all our planet and its surroundings?? It's really outrageous that they do it in first hands but why are we so powerless to stop them? Omg, it's so fucked up.
@sundogplanets The FCC's mandate and expertise is in protecting communications, ensuring satellites don't interfere with each other, etc. They have much less expertise in protecting from externalities like the night sky, etc, and it now shows.
@sundogplanets Like, if you asked most people "what is the primary agency that regulates launching things into orbit", almost no one (who doesn't already know) would guess "the FCC".
@mattblaze @sundogplanets in a sane world it’d be an international body.
@sundogplanets I'm disappointed that one of the "all satellites everywhere all the time" companies hasn't just thrown a bunch of cheap-ish telescopes into orbit and opened them up to you lot.
But then Elon did promise to end world hunger and when the quote arrived he went very quiet and never paid up. It was only ~$6B IIRC, which even at the time was less than 5% of his wealth.
@sundogplanets I have come to the conclusion that the best way to predict what the techbros will propose next is to just read Robert Heinlein’s YA science fiction novels and see what hasn’t been proposed yet. (Because a whole lot of the clearly impossible nonsense seems to be pulled from those books with the occasional misunderstanding of some Asimov or Clarke stories)
@sundogplanets
I guess they used AI to generate the feasibility study.
@sundogplanets They're just gonna put up a space laser or some bullshit like that when they can't get it to work.
@sundogplanets The same energy there as the 'glyphosate is as safe as salt' myth that was perpetuated by Monsanto during the rollout of RoundUp
@camless @sundogplanets Cigarettes are good for pregnant women! It helps keep them calm, and soothes the throat!
@sundogplanets I think your post should be your opening paragraph!
