One of the worst ideas in history, in my opinion.

It was born of a competitive instinct to compete with long standing 5G efforts which had been made cooperatively up until very recently.

The Tesla company development took place, driven by profit, in spite of many longstanding space technology practitioners and experts advising against it, at least those who were asked.

As a practitioner still in systems of all kinds including communications, satellites and otherwise, I still do not see the technical argument behind the drive to launch this storm of satellites.

Agreed, as mobile comms have progressed, we’ve seen antennas proliferate. But with that, the power of our handsets have drastically reduced, since it takes much less power to transmit to a closer antenna, so we can say we are irradiating ourselves much less now than we were when mobile telephony first became popular.

How much power does anyone think will be necessary for a handset or otherwise, to connect with a satellite?

The answer will shock, for sure.

In addition, the new constellation is effectively a whirling time bomb, which will sooner or later wipe out pretty much all existing satellites and probably also any future chance of human space exploration, in my opinion.

I once produced software, around 2003, which modelled the trajectory of all satellites in the sky, using the input data and algorithm of NASA three line entities (TLEs), developed and kindly distributed by a legendary figure in the community of anti-collision satellite surveillance, TS Kelso.

The computation load of that app was such that an upper limit to the possible number of objects it could handle had to be set at around 10,000, which was more than enough to monitor everything launched in history until then.

But it wouldn’t be adequate now.

The reason people were so interested back then was that there had been some very damaging incidents of collision.

When a collision happens at thousands of miles per hour between objects, they literaly explode, with shrapnel flying off in all directions, which then can collide with more objects, quickly cascading into chaos.

NASA and ESA spent much time and effort trying to find a solution to the problem of space pollution for good reason.

Those efforts towards human safety enhancement, in common with things like pre-emptive vaccine research, were discontinued because no profit could be seen there.

In short, it doesn’t take many collisions to trigger a catastrophic storm of debris flying every direction which wipes out an entire strata of satellites, leaving only a useless, lethal layer of whirling debris in that orbit.

One is enough.

The lower the orbit of such a layer, the more damaging it is, because it endangers the possibility of successfully launching anything that can remain safe through it, such as replacement communications and gps satellites, upon which we are heavily dependent.

All it takes is for a single object to go rogue (out of control), taking an unplanned path, colliding with another, then all hell can break loose.

With Tesla’s record of space technology reliability, how long will it be, until one or more of those satellites goes out of control and collides with others in different different trajectories?

I hope with all my heart it doesn’t happen, but what will it take before we might finally admit, everything that traces back to profit always ends badly, for us as a species, after it has ruined our environment?

That, seems to be the thing in the system that needs to be somehow eliminated, hopefully before it eliminates us.