“The potentially long-term environmental harms of deploying tens of thousands of satellites are still unclear.”
No Brakes
Over one hundred astronomers have signed an open letter urging the US Federal Communications Commission to pause all Starlink and other mega-constellation launches, fearing their environmental impact and the obstruction they pose to ground-based observatories trying to image deep space.
The pause should be held until scientists can fully assess the risks of deploying expendable satellites at such a scale, the astronomers argue, criticizing the FCC for excluding mega-constellations from being subject to environmental review.
“Artificial satellites, even those invisible to the naked eye, can obstruct astronomical observations that help detect asteroids and understand our place in the universe,” Robert McMillan, an astronomer at the University of Arizona and one of the letter’s authors, told Space.com.
“The potentially long-term environmental harms of deploying tens of thousands of satellites,” he continued, “are still unclear.”
Satel-Lights
There are currently over 9,000 active satellites in orbit. SpaceX’s Starlink constellations account for more than half of that number, with around 6,500 functional spacecraft in the array, according to a database run by Harvard astronomer Jonathan McDowell.
The striking thing is that SpaceX only started launching in 2019. In all of human spacefaring history, about 19,5000 satellites have been placed into the Earth’s orbit, per the European Space Agency.
That’s a whiplash-inducing pace of acceleration. Understandably, this has frustrated astronomers in recent years, who complain that the bright constellations are ruining observations of the night sky.
What’s more, an emerging body of evidence suggests that the radiation emitted by the satellite’s onboard electronics are interfering with radio telescopes, potentially kneecapping our best way of peering into the deepest reaches of the cosmos.
Danger From Above
The potential environmental harms also can’t be overlooked. Space junk cluttering low Earth orbit was already a problem before the advent of mega-constellations, which have only exacerbated the issue.
Beyond the dangers this could pose to other spacecraft, a growing concern is that these expendable satellites, which are only intended to last a few years, could seriously pollute our planet as they continuously re-enter and burn up in the atmosphere.
The Federal Aviation Administration has also warned that these falling satellites could kill people. We may be underestimating the amount of fragments that survive re-entry, as a worrying number of spacecraft components that were designed to burn up in the atmosphere are instead crashing down to Earth.
“The space industry has moved faster than the public or regulators were able to keep up, and we’ll continue to raise the importance of this issue with the public,” Lucas Gutterman, who spearheaded the letter and serves as director of the nonprofit Public Interest Research Group, told Space.com. “The speed and scale of the new space race should be a kitchen-table issue, not an esoteric discussion among a small group of industry insiders.”
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