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In a country (Japan, China, Korea) where most people have never seen the night sky filled with stars, little lone a meteor, or for heaven's sake a comet, astronomy has a totally different meaning to them. It is a curiosity, and treated as being almost mystical, only for those in Universities and NASA, and way beyond the grasp of the everyday person. Most people have not even looked through a telescope either, and forget any sort of tangible comprehension of the Earth's place in the solar system.
Understand this, and you come to see why such a Start Up has caught so much traction.
When a lot, if not most, of the bureaucrats also fall into this broad population situation, it makes it difficult for legislators to make sense of this proposal and its impact. The "closely guarded secret" of the 11 herbs and spices cocktail of chemicals used for the light show, it makes a mockery of EPA safeguards too.
Even here in Australia, despite the great sky we still have, most people still view astro with some degree of trepidation, even suspicion. Heck, I've come very close to being assaulted by a bloke who thought I was yanking his chain with the view of Saturn through my C5 (and an SCT IS NOT what most people know of as a telescope), and had the bloody Spooks called on me on another ocassion. The media also does a poor job of things too through their shear ignorance. They are also playing up to the "sensation" that is this artifical meteor shower, even here in Oz - I'm finding ads about this "news story" pop up on various apps.
We as an astro fraturnity, with access to a fantastic night sky and having experience of things astro, we can be easily outraged by this artificial meteor shower. In a way it is WE who are out of touch with the general public in this case. If you look at this from the point of view of the general public, you can see why this has so much appeal. And very likely, if we don't chose our words carefully in voicing opposition, we stand to come across as being "precocious nerds".
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