Our Best Telescopes for Spotting Planet-Killer Asteroids are Getting Their Views Partially Blocked by Elon Musk's Satellites
Pool. Getty Images.I consider myself an Elon Musk guy. Particularly when it comes to his efforts in space.
As a general rule, I prefer my space races to be country vs. country, a battle between competing philosophies battling it out for supremacy, with the soul of the rest of the planet as the prize. And not just a billionaires' club. A dick-shaped rocket measuring contest between the guy who started an airline I'll never fly against the guy who has his delivery drivers pissing in bottles. But if I have to pick a side in that battle, I'm on Team Musk. At least he's got a plan for space exploration that involves more than just stroking his own ego and hanging out with Michael Strahan.
Musk is talking about colonizing Mars. His company takes more payloads into orbit than every other agency and country in the world combined. Some of his ideas sound farfetched and downright wacky, but when you hear him talk, you come away convinced that human progress has always been carried forward by imaginative, forward thinkers such as him. Plus, he gives us content like this:
As well as this:
If I wasn't 95% convinced he's an alien hybrid, I'd say the Time Man of the Year was the most interesting human alive.
But even his visionary innovation is coming to us at a price:
Source - A fifth of all images taken by a crucial asteroid-spotting telescope are disrupted by Elon Musk's SpaceX Starlink satellites, a new study has revealed.
SpaceX has been launching an increasing number of internet satellites since 2018, with over 2,000 now in low Earth orbit, about 340 miles above the planet.
The aim is to provide higher speed, high quality internet to the most remote places on Earth, via the Starlink internet satellite constellation.
However, the satellites have been heavily criticised by astronomers, who say the objects can appear as streaks in telescope images, hampering their scientific observations. …
The streaks were most obvious in twilight observations taken at dawn or dusk, which is a vital point in the night for spotting near-Earth asteroids. …
During [CalTech's observatory's] scans, it is cataloguing cosmic objects that explode, blink, or otherwise change over time, which can be indicative of a near-Earth asteroid.
Great. That's just great. We're putting the whole survival of the planet at risk, just so we can have WiFi everywhere. I mean, so what's the harm in risking a mass extinction like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs as long as campers in Alaska can post photos to the 'Gram, nomads riding camels through the desert can check Facebook, and millionaires sailing their yachts across the Pacific can read my blogs and order Barstool merch? (Actually, that last one is worth the risk.) All because our early warning system for detecting cataclysms has an obstructed view. The most important telescope we have, reduced to someone sitting behind a pole at Fenway Park.
Did we learn nothing from "Armageddon"? "Deep Impact"? Hell, the last I looked "Don't Look Up" had more views than the next eight shows on Netflix put together. And now we're potentially living it, but with my guy Musk as the Mark Rylance character. What all those films should have taught us (other than Morgan Freeman should've been elected POTUS decades ago), is that when trying to deflect a massive death boulder hurtling through space aimed right for us, time is of the essence. The longer you miss it, the closer it is and the more power it takes to change its trajectory. But here are the very scientists watching the skies for us having to yell "Down in front!" to SpaceX.
I hope those new and improved upload speeds on everybody's TikToks will be worth our extinction. And that the one Musk's satellites block from our view can't be measured in Texases.