I was scrolling through the assorted stories provided on the hidden news panel, you know the window that is revealed if you hover your cursor over the bottom left corner of your computer screen (I don’t know if this is present on a Mac computer). I clicked on a couple of them, but for the most part there was nothing that piqued my interest enough to read, and definitely not enough to write about.
Then I saw it! “SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches Starlink satellites from California, lands on ship at sea”

I plugged the article title into Ground News to see who was reporting on it, what kind of bias and factuality the articles had and was surprised to see that it was only centric sources reporting and all were either listed as high factuality or very high factuality, including the Space article title that had brought me down this rabbit hole. So I read the article, thinking I would have something scathing to write about another failure of Musk because seeing him publicly fail through his companies seems to be reason to celebrate after the past few months.
I was disappointed. I read the article in its entirety, and rather than information on a failed SpaceX mission, I was greeted with news of another successful delivery of another 26 Starlink satellites being delivered to low Earth orbit, and the fact that there are part of a ‘more than 7,000 operational satellite’ lattice like formation that ‘blankets nearly all of the planet’.
The part in the headline that caught my attention about the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket landing on a ship at sea, was really in fact that ‘About 8.5 minutes after liftoff, the booster landed safely on SpaceX’s Of Course I Still Love You drone ship, stationed in the Pacific Ocean.’ There was no spectacular display of failure, unless you count the name of the drone ship.
But let me back up a sec, that article said the ‘Starlink megaconstellation’ consists of ‘more than 7,000 operational satellites’ in low Earth orbit and that ‘blankets nearly all of the planet’… maybe I don’t need to preface this with saying that I don’t trust Musk, but. I don’t trust Musk, and while maybe this is just fanciful speculation, it raises questions in my mind about what his potential nefarious ulterior motives are.
What do you think? Is having thousands of SpaceX controlled satellites in low Earth orbit, literally littering our sky, a concern? Or was I just clickbaited into reading a pro-SpaceX article?