So I did the thing again where I set an alarm for 3:15 AM to watch a rocket launch, and then couldn't fall back asleep for two hours afterward, and now it's Thursday and I'm running on the kind of tired that coffee doesn't actually fix, it just postpones.
SpaceX put up another 60 Starlink satellites early Wednesday morning from Cape Canaveral, on a Falcon 9 booster that's already flown a couple of missions before this one. This is, what, the sixth batch of 60 now? Somewhere around there. Nobody seems to agree on the exact running total because a handful of the very first test satellites got deliberately deorbited a while back, so depending on who's counting you get a different number. Call it somewhere north of 400 in orbit at this point. That's a lot of satellites for a constellation that's supposed to eventually have thousands.
I want to be clear that watching these launches is still, genuinely, one of the few good things happening to me right now during lockdown. The countdown, the "go for launch," the booster coming back down and landing on the drone ship in the Atlantic like it's no big deal even though it is a huge deal every single time — that stuff still gets me. I don't think I'll ever be jaded about a rocket landing itself vertically on a boat. My wife thinks I'm insane for the 3 AM alarm thing but she also doesn't watch, so.
Here's the part where I complain a little, because that's allowed on my own blog. The satellite trains these things create right after deployment are genuinely wrecking the view for a lot of amateur astronomers, and I say this as someone who bought a decent telescope back in March specifically because I had nothing else to do and figured lockdown was as good a time as any to finally get into stargazing. First clear night I had it out, I caught what I'm pretty sure was a Starlink chain crossing the eyepiece view, a little train of bright dots moving in a dead straight line, and it kind of ruined the moment. I get that they fade and spread out as they climb to operational altitude over a few weeks. I get that SpaceX has said they're working on darkening coatings to cut the reflectivity. I still think it's a little rude that a private company gets to change what the night sky looks like for everyone on Earth without really asking anyone first. Astronomers have been pretty vocal about this since last year and I don't think it's just grumpy old-guard telescope people being precious about it either.
None of which is really SpaceX's fault specifically, to be fair to them — somebody was always going to build a satellite internet constellation eventually, they're just the ones actually doing it at scale right now, with Amazon's Kuiper thing still mostly a PowerPoint deck as far as I can tell and OneWeb having just filed for bankruptcy a few weeks back. So it's basically SpaceX or nothing at the moment if you want broadband from orbit.
And the broadband part is the actual point, I keep reminding myself, not the light pollution. There are apparently something like 100,000 people already in a private beta for Starlink internet in parts of the northern US, and if even half the hype pans out this could matter enormously for rural areas that have been stuck on satellite internet with 600ms of latency and data caps that make video calls miserable. Which, given that half the planet is currently stuck at home trying to do video calls for work, feels less like a nice-to-have and more like actual infrastructure. My in-laws live way out past where the cable company bothers to run lines and their current internet situation is genuinely rough. If this thing works the way it's supposed to, I'd sign them up in a heartbeat.
Anyway. I watched a livestream at 3 AM, I'm tired, my telescope has a new nemesis, and I still set my alarm for the next one. Make it make sense.