> perhaps will miss the most important discoveries of the universe because of such programs
Unlikely for a number of reasons, and actually a large commercial constellation could help with scientific discovery.
Satellite trajectories are predictable from published ephemerides. It’s trivial for telescope operators to exclude the small fraction of pixels in a frame occupied by a satellite. They already do this.
Furthermore, the same technology that makes it economical to put millions of satellites into LEO (e.g. Starship) also makes it cheaper to build larger telescopes in space where they’re unaffected by the earth’s atmosphere (and satellites in LEO).
If SpaceX spent a ton of resources developing Moon and Mars base plane they’d be criticized for not focusing on the launch vehicle. The railroad company also doesn’t necessarily need to be the ones building the towns.
Starship has experienced setbacks but isn’t a “massive failure” by any measure.
Again, “What I find silly is the certainty that critics have that SpaceX will fail”.
I doubt you’ve done enough investigation to conclude that. Watching a couple a YouTube videos about how data centers in space are dumb doesn’t count.
For one, it’s not one big hundred megawatt-scale datacenter, but many smaller rack-sized satellites.
Two, there are many trade offs SpaceX can make to reduce the overall cost. The radiated power is proportional to the 4th power of the temperature, so anything they can do to increase the temperature drastically reduces the size of the radiators, including custom silicon, heat pumps, etc. There’s also novel radiator technology like liquid droplet radiators that could be worth developing.
Third, there are reasons to put it in space: solar panel efficiency, no cost for land, less regulation, no NIMBYs, etc.
I’m confident you could devise a way to ensure the verifying party doesn’t know which website requested the verification, and vice versa. I’ll have to think about it a bit more.
In general I'm opposed to this kind of regulation, but as a thought exercise, we do have the primitives needed to do age (or any other attribute) verification in a privacy-preserving and decentralized way.
You could imagine a hierarchy of organizations (governments, financial institutions, schools, etc) that a website trusts to verify some attribute (minimum age, citizenship, etc). Those organizations can attest that some identifier like an email address has been verified to belong to a real individual with that attribute, and that organization belongs to the hierarchy the website trusts, without revealing anything else about the user, the exact verifying organization, or the requesting website.
If the price moves down when a Starship test flight doesn't achieve all objectives that's probably a good opportunity to buy. Many people think "rocket go boom, must be bad" but to some extent it's expected during the development phase. They get more useful data about where the limits are when it doesn't work.
Of course there's limits to that, but SpaceX has a lot of cash to absorb failures, unlike in the early days.
What's that theory? Who are the "people getting out after the forced buying"? People who bought assuming there would be an increase in price due to forced buying?
> every human body is a bit weird and there will almost always be something "wrong" that will be visible in a full body scan
Would this be solved by routine scans, so you have a baseline you can compare against? Ignore anything slightly odd in the first scan but monitor for changes over time?
Unlikely for a number of reasons, and actually a large commercial constellation could help with scientific discovery.
Satellite trajectories are predictable from published ephemerides. It’s trivial for telescope operators to exclude the small fraction of pixels in a frame occupied by a satellite. They already do this.
Satellite operators are also careful not to transmit towards radio quiet zones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_quiet_zone
Furthermore, the same technology that makes it economical to put millions of satellites into LEO (e.g. Starship) also makes it cheaper to build larger telescopes in space where they’re unaffected by the earth’s atmosphere (and satellites in LEO).