"What the hell is that?"
Posted on 05/09/2021 6:21:13 AM PDT by ETL
That’s actually pretty cool. I wonder how close they actually are to each other.
My son is a flight operations engineer at NASA. He controls an array of four satellites that orbit in formation, sometimes as close as four kilometers apart. although the “flying” is all done by strings of commands performed well in advance, it’s still pretty stressful.
His is a scientific mission and the satellites are worth about a billion dollars each. Not a mistake you want to make.
Ping.
When Elon was criticized for ruining the joy of gazing into the night sky, he simply shrugged and said “Well if you really want to be inspired by gazing at stars, you will have to come with me to Mars, eat mushrooms and help build the observatories.”
“We Come In Peace”
“It’s a cook book,
Don’t get on”
🛸
Ah, the creepy conga line.
Musk, I hope you’re a good guy...
Great picture.
If they were UFOs they would be zigging and zagging all over the place (up, down, different angles)—rather easy to tell the difference.
If someone wasn't aware of this project, and if they had a brain in their head, it would be one heck of a shock looking up and seeing this. Less so if they were previously familiar with observing satellites in the sky. Once, while camping, we saw a tight triangular formation of satellites. Turned out they were US Navy spy satellites.
Most interesting having a son involved in such a thing, and at such a high level. You must be very proud of him.
That little parade would be perfect for multi link satellite trunking in Starlink. I wouldn’t mind a 20 satellite trunk feed to the house. 20 x 1GB/sec = 20GB/sec.
If it’s flying and I can’t identify it, it’s a UFO to me!
The Falcon 9 launched, delivered its upper stage and payload, and landed on the drone ship, making that number ten for that booster. The Starlink network is going to consist of 12,000 satellites, and while nowhere near that number are in orbit, the network is very close right now to full global coverage.
It’s Star Trek: A wagon train to the stars.
Really want to send the Leftists into a tizzy? Tell them it is part of Ronald Reagan’s visible STAR WARS (High Frontier) anti missile program to protect the US from foreign nukes.
Astronomers don’t care.
Astro-photographers care.
Astronomers are smart enough to plan for these things and work around them. Astro-photographers don’t seem to be able to do that.
I never heard of a single satellite being worth a billion dollars, much less four of them in formation EACH worth a billion.
Thanks! Will definitely check it out.
Heavens-Above.com is a great website for satellites and other sky observations.
I saw them. Decided it had to be human caused. Glad I’m (maybe) right.
When it’s so hard & costly to put up a serious satellite, not unreasonable for them to be a billion each. Have to get everything right the first time.
Starlink can be cheap because costs are cut thru reuse and sheer numbers.
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