Strange Lights Over South Aurora

[Grant H.]

As has been said, it was likely Starlink birds. There are currently 900+ starlink satellites in orbit, with a planned constelation of 12,000. That 12k could be expanded out to 42k depending on need/availability. Starlink birds are launched in groups of 60 (usually, some times ride shares reduce that number) and are released in a group. They then conga-line their way into their appropriate orbits over the course of a few days to a few weeks depending on what their planned orbit is.

Once SpaceX gets their Starship LV up and running, it should be capable of launching 400 starlink sats in a single shot.


This might be of interest to folks in this thread...

http://celestrak.com/cesium/orbit-vi...ferenceFrame=1

There is a lot of stuff up there.

[Martinjmpr]

We saw some of those in May of 2019 while on a camping trip. We had no idea what they were.

Best part is that we were camping at the "UFO Watchtower" in the San Luis Valley near Great Sand Dunes. Thought we were seeing real UFO's!

Then one of the people we were camping with pulled out her phone and looked it up - sure enough it was Starlink.

But it had us going for a minute there!

[daemon]

Site for Starlink sightings: https://findstarlink.com/#1554;3 . Starlink should be visible in Denver tonite and tomorrow night.

[Aardvark]

An anti-aircraft unit in C.Springs let a burst fly north. Far enough away you couldn't hear it. Now...where's my rum gone... ;-)

[O2HeN2]

Did it look like this?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgys...=ViralVideoLab

O2

[FoxtArt]

My brother and his young kids saw the first train when camping out around Norwood without any cell service. In small part, they were halfway wondering if they could be ICBM's (west from China). Once they got back to civilization they were amused!


It really is a tragedy that we are permitting these constellations IMHO.

This is for internet service that will be obsolete in under 5-10 years, we're increasing the number of satellites in earth by orders of magnitude... And the constellations will not naturally deorbit for much, much, much longer then that. Inevitably they will want approval for another 40,000 satellites in 5 years to provide for increases in bandwidth, customers, and technology.

40,000 satellites will make it all but cause radio telescope observations to be near worthless from earth; on top of all the other issues it causes, as well as long term risks. And then we have all the other constellations pending approvals. At some point it will be difficult for kids to discern what stars are from all the movement in the background.

I wish we preserved orbital space for longer-term missions, advancing science, etc... and not throwing it all away for another bullshit ISP option for customers to download porn. What's next?

[GilpinGuy]

This is for internet service that will be obsolete in under 5-10 years

How so? 5g won't be up here for a loooooooong time. I've been up here for 20+ years and the ONLY option is satellite internet or, if you get a decent enough signal, a cell based service (and thats only if you don't need it to be super fast).

[00tec]

https://kdvr.com/news/local/friday-n...eo-and-camera/

[FoxtArt]

How so? 5g won't be up here for a loooooooong time. I've been up here for 20+ years and the ONLY option is satellite internet or, if you get a decent enough signal, a cell based service (and thats only if you don't need it to be super fast).

Obsolete in the sense of Moore's law. Their competitors and China will launch 20,000 sats that offer 4x the bandwidth, so spacex is going to need to launch another 35,000 to do 6x the bandwidth, India will need to launch 30,000, then spacex will have a breakthrough and need to launch another 25,000.... It's of course entering new markets, but it also opened the flood gate. China is already planning their own as are competitors, and it's the underlying competing technology that they will constantly want to update. And besides, once we have 80k what's another 15,000?

[FoxtArt]

Internet service is something that is not even a decade long proposition for hardware anymore. Bandwidth requirements will likely double every 5 years. These sats stay in orbit up to hundreds of years. Last I heard Somewhere between 9 and 12 of them are already dead and uncontrolled. Risks include blocking off space entirely due to cascading collisions (Kessler IIRC) and being essentially blind to incoming near earth objects since the radio telescopes are the most effective at identifying them. And NEOs are not "if it happens" just "when" for a city or country killer. Probably not in our lifetime, but it would sure suck to have last-minute notice for sake of good quality on the Netflix before we are pulverised into goop.