Here's a guess of how night sky would change, visualized at midnight from latitude 50N on the Summer Solstice with Blue Origin's 51,000 orbital data centers on sun-synchronous orbits (compared with Starlink. Hard to make Starlink look not so bad, but here we are.)
The orbits are from @planet4589.bsky.social's website, the reflection/orbit code is from https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ac341b, and the brightnesses are guesses based on freaking huge reflecting areas.
@sundogplanets @planet4589.bsky.social
I don’t know enough to interpret those images without reading up. What’s g-mag?
@sundogplanets @planet4589.bsky.social
Space the final frontier… it’s shrinking in the rear view mirror
@sundogplanets @planet4589.bsky.social
I propose we collectively start using the saying:
"I have a data center to sell you".
Such unbelievably blatant grift. Just.. wow.
@sundogplanets @planet4589.bsky.social
😐
Are these mag for individual sats or mag per some area? Is there any good way to relate these to non-astronomers' everyday experience? "As bright as the brightest 50 stars" wouldn't sound so bad, but 10,000 of them next to each other will surely be much worse.
@knud Yeah, I've got a note about how many are naked-eye visible "Nvis" in the plot, but I need a better way to show how this compares with visible stars...
Yes, I got the numbers, but the surface density is going to be key, right? 4500 sats over a small strip (10deg?) wide and then 180deg long makes, what, 2-3 per deg²? That's one per Moon. I'm sure that has a psychological effect beyond individual brightness.
@knud Oof yeah you're totally right. Ugh... this is gross.
This is just one of at least 4 planned megaconstellations (maybe we should call them hypermegaconstellations or gigaconstellations?) that all want to use sun-synchronous orbits for orbital data centers, which probably can't even actually exist.
And if someone from Blue Origin (or SpaceX, I'm not picky) and says "oh that's all wrong, we'll be much fainter" I say PROVE IT. SHOW ME A BETTER SIMULATION.
Anyway, the baselines have shifted. These swarms of thousands of satellites are now calling themselves "small constellations" because they're smaller than SpaceX's monster stupid awful million satellite FCC filing. I hate it all so much.
But these sun-synchronous orbits are definitely prime real estate for slop swarm builders. And the orbits all intersect (or nearly intersect) at the poles, crossing every 90 min. So... yet another way to speed run to Kessler Syndrome, I guess.
@sundogplanets I sure hope that they don’t put large constellations into the sun-synchronous orbits that we use for Earth Observation satellites.
@sundogplanets well, etymologically speaking, "syndrome" means "run together" and if they cross at the poles they will run into each other.
@sundogplanets How does it make economic sense in their dementia to do it like that?
@sundogplanets The hyperconstellation of data centers in sun-synchronous orbit people are going to get a surprise when they find out there's no orbit that doesn't have at least some eclipse times, up to 20 minutes. That might sound like no big deal until you consider how large the batteries would need to be to power one of those AI data center satellites when the solar panels are in darkness. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sun-always-shines-tv-hugh-lewis-tlkbe/
Can they even put 50k sats in sunsynchronous orbits without Dr. Kessler instantly wanting to have a word?
It's ALL wrong regardless @sundogplanets @planet4589.bsky.social 😳
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