yay. wee. more space junk.
Then again, if people look up, see this thing, and marvel, even for a few minutes, maybe worth it. Still not happy at the 'art' and the possibility of it disrupting LEO operations. And of course this is a bird-brained idea and Kickstarter is involved.
Fuck this article and fuck your attitude. I nearly paid for that kickstarter. I owe my fascination with satellites to Trevor Paglen, who's a hell of a nice guy. We owe much of our modern technological infrastructure to fascination with Sputnik - GPS exists because a freshman at MIT built a receiver to track it and figured out that if he reversed the signal flow he could figure out where he was on earth. 143 people paid $76k to launch a damn cubesat that will be shiny shiny for two fucking months. I haven't seen this much dudgeon since Irridium Next, which was a constellation of emitters instead of a single, passive, ephemeral little point of light that, by the way, has to fit in a 10cmx10cmx10cm box and will be hanging out lower than the ISS. Y'all astronomers can be mad about this shit but it basically proves that you'll be fuckin' mad about anything and it's attitudes like this that make Palomar have to fight every time San Diego County wants to upgrade their streetlights. Fuckin' get the broom out of your ass and be ready at the max two star parties it could possibly impact to point up and say "yeah - that's a satellite that launched just because a handful of normal people wanted to be able point at the sky a few times and say 'I did that.'" I watched the NRO put up an eight billion dollar satellite for the express purpose of watching the top of bin Laden's head. I would think your community would be over the goddamn moon that someone would loft a balloon for the sheer joy of looking at it.