Brutkey

Prof. Sam Lawler
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social

I've seen some truly bad headlines related to this paper. Clearly LLM-written and not checked well. The funniest (saddest) ones seem to imply that 3 days from now, there will definitely be a crash in orbit.

I'm glad conversations are happening as a result of this paper. I hope the right conversations happen with the right people, and maybe some regulations will happen? Probably not fast enough. But I'm still holding out hope (and writing lots of letters to the FCC).

Prof. Sam Lawler
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social

Oh hey look, a Starlink satellite "experienced an anomaly" and ejected a bunch of debris. Explosion? Debris hit? Either way, not good..

https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlink-satellite-malfunctions-ejects-debris-fragments

editing to add snark (because that's how I deal with bad news I guess): Don't worry everyone, SpaceX says it'll reenter in a few weeks and totally won't crash into anything! Please ignore the spray of debris that's at basically the exact same altitude as the ISS!


Prof. Sam Lawler
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social

To clarify, I don't think this is at all catastrophic. Just bad. Making orbit less safe with every explosion. Making that CRASH Clock a little shorter, giving operators a little less time to respond, requiring more tracking, more maneuvers, and increasing operating risks in orbit.

Prof. Sam Lawler
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social

I look at https://spaceweather.com/ all the time to check for auroras. Pretty cool to see a paper I'm a co-author on featured there!!