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this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2026
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Alternatively, we could reinstate NASA's funding, and come up with an actually sane way to get Internet service to remote areas that doesn't involve what is essentially "space littering". Putting thousands of satellites into space for something that can be done way more practically on the ground makes every future thing you do in space harder, and severely hampers land-based astronomy. They have to track every nut and bolt in orbit for as long as they stay there, or one of those things will blow something to smithereens, even if it is small, like a literal nut or bolt.
We're letting private entities potentially trap our children here on Earth by failing to regulate and enforce what can be up there. If you envision a future with space colonies and exploration, SpaceX and Starlink are not how you get there. I'm sure its doing a great job letting yokels in the swamp watch foxnews.com though, so there's that.
We've tried to do it on the ground for decades to little success. We give them money, and they say, oh so sorry we spent it all and did 0.001% of the requirements.
SpaceX and these other LEO constellations can do it in a few years, at their own risk.
Also, these constellations serve areas that fiber will never serve. 5g towers maybe in many but not all, but never fiber. They also serve areas like the ocean, and air, some of which will never be served by 5g.
edit: Also there's no risk of trapping us on earth with something like Starlink. It's too low and will resolve any mass destruction in a handful of short years. The risk comes with something like Eutelsat One Webs constellation at 1200km that will last millennia in a Kessler Syndome type doomsday scenario.
We keep giving them the money before they do it and then don't do anything completely withing our power to hold them accountable when they don't? Sounds like regulatory capture to me.
I'm talking about before then. Describing the failures of government systems at this point in history seems a bit like diagnosing why a car that's at the bottom of a lake won't start. We have to back up and look at the whole scenario to see why not to blame the engine or even pop the hood.
You can see a real life major success case in my previous example. It was not at all profitable to run telephone service to rural communities below a certain size at all, but it was mandated and they did it. We did subsidize its deployment, but they also did do it.
These systems can and do work, but other systems that they require have failed. It may not be practical or even possible to make every such system that society needs be immune to this sort of tampering, so until that is figured out, if ever, we must protect things we need that are susceptible to it, and put a stop to the bad behavior, not just what it caused.