SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites. Here's how that could impact the atmosphere and the night sky
CBC
Most of humanity has a great propensity to think in the short-term, but generally, long-term considerations — air pollution, deforestation and emissions, for example — just aren't our thing.
That's partly why scientists are deeply concerned about a recent SpaceX proposal to launch one million satellites — data centres — into orbit around Earth.
Their concerns range from losing the natural night sky, to losing access to space, to the environmental impact on our atmosphere.
At the moment, there are roughly 16,000 satellites orbiting Earth, 14,000 of which are active. SpaceX is responsible for more than 8,000 of them.
That number changes weekly as the company both deorbits satellites — where they burn up in our atmosphere — and sends up more. On average, the company launches more than two dozen satellites twice a week.
SpaceX officials have said they would like to see upwards of 40,000 of these Starlink satellites in orbit. The satellites provide internet connectivity to every part of the world, even the most remote locations.
But that’s a lot of stuff in space, and it doesn't even account for the more than 140 million pieces of space debris ranging in size from one millimetre to 10 centimetres. All of these objects threaten astronauts who venture into space, as well as the satellites we depend on for tools like GPS.
That's why adding another million satellites into orbit is mind-boggling.
“We saw this transition from thousands of satellites to 10,000 satellites largely done through SpaceX. And we were very worried about maintaining a healthy orbital environment with that,” said Aaron Boley, co-director at the Outer Space Institute and a professor at the University of British Columbia’s department of physics and astronomy.
“This just blows right past that. And by almost all metrics that we can think of, this is just a bad idea in terms of our long-term use and access to space.”
SpaceX has filed their million satellite proposal to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), citing the need for data centres that won’t have an environmental impact here on Earth. For instance, they said the orbiting data centres would not need to use water for cooling, and noted that the sun would provide them with near constant energy.
Public comments on the plan closed on Friday. As of this writing, there were more than 1,000 comments, with the vast majority of them asking the FCC not to proceed.
OK, so what’s the big deal with having so many things in space? Space is big after all, right?
It’s about those long-term consequences we’re so bad at thinking about.
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