On the earth side, the complaints about the Starlink offer from Elon Musk are limited. Internet connections via satellites with high data transmission rates are advertised, even in remote regions, and advertised with simplicity and convenience: a dedicated app helps to choose the right location for the receiving dish, brackets for roof mounting or tripods for setting up in the garden can be ordered. The antenna aligns itself to the appropriate satellite. For two years now, it has even been supplied with a special heating function that is supposed to prevent snow from collecting in the bowl in winter and thus reducing the transmission capacity.
Recently, however, a Canadian Starlink customer had to complain about a conspicuously low data transfer rate, which is probably due to this heating function: In beautiful winter weather and temperatures of minus 25 degrees, five cats discovered the warming quality of the bowl and took a sunbath. More than 190,000 users have expressed their enthusiasm for the receipt photo published on Twitter. Some worry that the microwave radiation from the device could cook the poor animals at the lowest possible temperature. Others, on the other hand, ask anxiously whether the cats could not escape into the warm, only to be reassured by Aaron Taylor, the operator of the bowl: The animals - which, by the way, are protected by thick fur - have a heated cat house available,to which, however, they only retreated after sunset.
The process not only proves once again the interest in cats on the Internet, but it also shows that this interest can be mutual. In her essay “Cat Content - On the Intimacy of the Human-Pet Relationship in Digital Media”, published in 2016 in the “Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft”, Ina Bolinski states: “The interaction of animals and technology reveals the agency of animals when this becomes decisive for communication on the Internet. ”Or for the restriction of this communication.
Meanwhile, complaints about the Starlink program are piling up in orbit: Elon Musk is already orbiting more than one thousand five hundred satellites in near-Earth orbit, and it is expected to reach twelve thousand one day.
Again and again there is already a risk of collision with earth observation satellites and space stations.
Only last month, China protested to the relevant UN body after the Tiangong station almost collided with a Starlink satellite twice.
In space travel, communication is also limited, it seems, without the aid of cats.