Soft paywall, more of a minor speedbump.
This is hard to dismiss as a mere “hit piece”. The main point is some people expressing concern that one erratic person, sometimes seemingly pro-Russian, has so much control over important infrastructure. The main example is Ukraine, but Taiwan is mentioned too. Despite measured negativity, it is also mentioned how Starlink has helped Ukraine, with a positive comment from Ukraine’s digital minister.
It also has some nice animations and pictures (though the Starlink interconnect diagram looks hopelessly wrong).
I’m surprised the Starlink satellites don’t have cameras and sell realtime imaging as a product. It seems like a natural way for SpaceX to increase revenue and become indispensable to governments around the world. Or maybe they do and we just don’t know about it.
I can only speculate on reasons. Cameras would add mass and energy consumption, and they’re already launching a lot fewer satellites per launch as it is. I suspect that good imaging requires a lot of specialist knowledge and experience, like how to build lenses and sensors, and what frequencies of light to look at (visible? infrared? radar?), and how to do destriping and other image cleanup. There are already other companies with satellites in low orbits with frequent imaging and sales channels to customers, so I don’t think SpaceX would have that much of competitive edge (except having more satellites). Some Earth imaging is provided by governments for free, says Wikipedia’s Satellite imagery, including Landsat, MODIS, and ASTER for the U.S. alone. There are lots of private providers with high resolution, like down to 41 cm, so they probably have big imaging systems on their satellites.
As I understand it, the super high resolution satellites have to be super large because you run into optical limits on the lens structure. The Maxar 30cm resolution ones are the size of a small school bus.
While there’s probably a market for imagery that’s low resolution and ultra-fast refresh, it’d still add mass and complicate things and starlink is already a complicated project.
I half expect the next move will be space-based datacenters. I can imagine twitter’s new owner seeing the benefits in hosting entirely outside the jurisdiction of any government.
The thermal management would be a nightmare
I believe that international treaties require that each orbiting object be marked with the responsible nation, and that that nation has jurisdiction over it. I don’t know how the International Space Station is handled. I could probably quickly search for it, but I shouldn’t be spending time on this at the moment anyway (working hours).
Yeah, though honestly Elon could actually make his own country at this point and/or launch from international water.