Why Elon Musk is really building Starlink

I think my take on the astronomy thing is that this is not the last time we're going to encounter this conflict. Any future in which humanity expands into space is going to involve more activity on orbit. Space hotels and science stations and space telescopes and fuel depots to let us explore mars and the outer solar system are all going to interfere with ground astronomy just like the ISS and Starlink currently does. 

So it's not "starlink or ground astronomy" it's "the entirety of man's future in space... or ground astronomy". I'm all for minimizing the impact as far as we can (and it's something SpaceX is actively working on), but I think if ground astronomy is inconvenienced or forced to adapt (using more digital image processing to remove streaks from collected data), that's an acceptable tradeoff for "all of human space development going forward". Urban lights are a huge problem for ground astronomy as is, and I don't think anyone thinks it'd be reasonable to ban lightbulbs so that we could put ground observatories in more places.