alt Hacker NewsI wonder if (this part specifically) is a solvable problem? Is it their altitude that causes them to shine? Perhaps finally a commercial use for Vantablack?
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Anything up there needs to reflect as much as possible to avoid building up heat. That which it can’t reflect is absorbed and needs to be emitted as efficiently as possible. Vantablack would likely make it absorb heat readily and glow in the near-IR.
It’s not the visual that bothers me. It’s the evidence of a monopoly that is being built that will dominate humanity for the benefit of literally one person
Counterintuitively, the best way to make satellites less visible for ground observers is actually to make them MORE reflective. You want the reflection off the nadir side of the vehicle to be as specular (mirror-like) as possible so that the light reflected from the sun only makes it to a single point on the Earth's surface.
You can see that SpaceX (and probably other LEO operators as well) are already doing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfJWli7YKPw
This video is a good visual illustration of that effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8I25H3bnNw
This is a bit like suggesting we slather cars in vaseline to prevent traffic jams.
Maybe we could just blast Anish Kapoor into space on a one-man prison vessel instead?
Their brightness is a mixture of a lot of things, including the huge PV arrays and the angle they have with the sun when they cross the terminator between night and day.
Starlink have already put a lot of effort into their satellites being much less bright than most satellites, including tilting their PV away from earth during the terminator crossing, so from what I've read you'll mainly see them while they're being deployed and while de-orbiting.
(Part of my still-expanding draft blog post about space data centres is to work out how bright a million much larger objects would look. If they were in the orbit with the most sun, that's a terminator-following sun-synchronous orbit, which is maximum brightness).