Posted by amatheus 3 days ago
Makes perfect sense.
The opening sentence says:
> To create this composite image, photographer Brendan Larsen captured almost 600 photographs over a two-hour period and then manually stitched them together.
So, no human eyeballs could ever see that image.Go out tonight and just look at the sky for 5 mins and I'll guarantee you'll see a couple of satellites flying past.
As with a lot of other technologies, the genie is out of the bottle and I don't think we're putting him back there again, this is the future.
Of all the things to be outraged over... satellites provide extremely valuable services and are pretty near harmless. There's the pollution from the launches, some uncertain concern over putting materials into the upper atmosphere when they reenter, and that's about it. The thing people complain about most is that they get in the way of photographs of the starts. Which is annoying, but also seems to be easily worked around, and is pretty small potatoes compared to planet-wide communications. Your neighbor operating a leaf blower with a dirty two-stroke engine is harming you more than these satellites are.
Luckily most sats in LEO do have maneuvering thrusters. But the fuel is very limited and the more of them are up there the more often they have to do corrections. Eventually something will have to give.