Because you're thinking of "space" as just boring orbital stuff. Astronomers think of our solar system, deep space, distant stars... a bunch of gadgets blocking the view of that is a legitimate concern.
It's not like the constellation move in unpredictable manner. The orbits are known, the movements are predictable, surely with some processing it shouldn't affect astronomy too much? If astronomers can overcome random atmospheric dispersion, surely they can elimitate starlink from post-processed images too?
I agree with the sentiment of the parent comment. Not because I have a huge passion for astronomy, but because I think we're prioritizing things in a wrong way.
We're prioritizing yet another billionare's networking business over the capacity to study our night's sky. Much like other types of pollution, this is something that could stick around for hundreds of years, even after all its utility is gone.
Cell towers, like most structures, can be brought down, repurposed, updated and altered. We can't do nothing about satellites, and don't know how to clean space pollution.
Firstly, the satellites fall out of orbit automatically within 5 years even if they break because they're in LEO. Secondly, again because they're in LEO they are invisible for most of the night while they are in Earth's shadow, not affecting stargazing or astronomy in the slightest during that time. It's only an hour or so near dawn and dusk where the satellites are visible.
Trying to match up that claim with the claim of https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/?special=starlink that satellites should be visible at 12:10am this Saturday over Boston. 12:10am is nowhere close to dusk in Boston this time of year.
12:10 AM Saturday in your device's time zone. 6:10 PM Friday in Boston's time zone. It's on my to-do list to change the displayed time zone when you select a faraway location instead of your current location, but just figuring out which time zone a given location is in is a non-trivial problem. Time zones are kind of bonkers, as I'm sure you're aware.
I just pushed a fix for timezones. It should convert to the local timezone if you choose a faraway location, and show the correct timezone abbreviation.
I feel that's a super limited point of view of the whole affair.
Starlink is here not because it makes a networking business (although it doesn't hurt).
Starlink is here because on Mars you need reliable communication and positioning over the planet, and you can only do that efficiently with satellites, and Starlink is destined for Mars, not Earth. What we have here is just the testing grounds for the technology.
Personally I'm stoked about pushing 1200 sattelites in orbit to Mars - highly automated, and it would make the current 2 orbiters by NASA as peanuts.
This is such an overly dramatic way of looking at it. Even at its most extreme Starlink will not really hurt our capacity to study our night's sky.
We are talking about a extremely tiny part of the sky that will only be visible very infrequently and the position is known at all times.
This does not impact most of astronomy at all.
Cleaning up space is not a technically impossible problem. It just has not yet been done because nobody had a need for it.
The waste majority of these satellites would fall back to earth, they can not stay 100s of years even in the worst case. Those few that do actually break and are to high up to wait out, can be collected once we have the scale of launch and service infrastructure. Until that point they would be on known location and SpaceX could make sure they don't hit anything.
It seems utterly absurd to me to ignore a massive technological leap for humanity because a tiny part of it hurts research (or is assumed to possible hurt research) and the idea that there is not enough space in orbit and that is not convincing at all.
