Jerry Hilburn
Sep 4, 2018 · 3 min read

I am an astronomer and I think this idea is purely selfish vanity.

Very few will pay attention to it. Even fewer will see it. But your lack of understanding how it would interfere with hundreds of observatories every night is what I find most annoying.

go here: http://www.hohmanntransfer.com/news.htm

This is a page for those of us who track asteroids every night. 6–8 new sightings occur every night we work to clear those newly found objects from a list of potentially hazardous objects.

When your space trash goes up it will definitely be tracked and identified in the hundreds of thousands of images taken over the 3 months it will take to burn up.

And then we have students who study double stars and write papers about those stars.

Go here: http://boyce-astro.org/publications/

every campaign we conduct takes multiple nights to collect images across 40+ telescopes world wide. Every image we take is stored, processed, and evaluated for use in these studies. Every image that contains a streak from a satellite is removed from the collection and we lose quite a few of the images to space junk.

Those images cost money. They don’t come free. Throwing out images because of space junk isn’t cheap.

People already have a fantastic way to accomplish what you claim your project will provide. It is called the ISS. Come to a star party and look up when it flies over. Now that is inspiring because guess what, it has human beings living inside of it.

When we look up at that light we see humanity rising.

Your light bulb is just one more piece of space junk. There are plenty of astronomers who don’t like it and they just stay quiet about it hoping that others do not repeat it.

After your 15 minutes of fame where a few sound bytes fill the ether with your noise, absolutely no one will pay attention to it except the thousands of people like me who have to throw out yet another image because some vanity driven egoist decided we should pay attention to his message in the sky.

This latest attempt to justify your project is something you thought up recently and is a bandage you’re throwing out, because so many people dislike this idea.

You asked in a past interview.

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“How — specifically — would Orbital Reflector interfere with the astronomer’s work?” Paglen wondered in the email. “Are they actually doing optical observations with telescopes? Are they worried about satellite moving through field of view of telescope? A ‘yes’ answer to this would be a little hard to believe to be honest — the image of an astronomer looking through a telescope to do ‘science’ is pretty anachronistic. It’s incredibly unlikely that Orbital Reflector would move through the field-of-view of a telescope right in the middle of an important observation and thereby ruin the observation.”

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Well Mr. Paglen I have outlined exactly how it works. You are clearly ignorant of this area of science. No working astronomer peers through an eye piece to capture information. We use imagery, tons of it, taken all night, every clear night available.

Now that you’re scrambling to find some excuse that covers up your ignorance I suppose “pissing off humanity” to get their attention makes a great cover for the real driver behind your project.

Vanity.

Your moment in time that will eventually fill a half page in a Wiki article about one man’s vanity and his desperate attempt to make it about anything else than his ego. And that is USELESS. Not Art….

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Jerry Hilburn

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Submariner, Astronomer, NASA Lecturer, and total space geek! Reporting my observations from the pale blue dot. We miss you Carl...