Looking up - 25 October 2019

Satellites do wonderful things for us, keeping telephony and entertainment going as well as navigation, power station timing, weather reporting - in short we would be hard-pressed to run the modern world without them now. But how many do we really need? Recently SpaceX gained US approval to launch 12,000 into space and have applied to launch a further 30,000 into orbit. Aside from problems associated with space junk, these satellites interfere with astronomy.