SpaceX wants to launch many more satellites
Photo by Charles Boyer / Alamy
Astronomers are scrambling to determine the environmental impact of SpaceX’s application to launch 1 million satellites as its approval deadline fast approaches.
On January 30, SpaceX announced that it had applied to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the US to send a huge mega-constellation of 1 million satellites into space, which CEO Elon Musk said would act as orbital data centers for artificial intelligence.
Satellites would far outnumber anything else in orbit, there are only 14,500 active satellites in space today. Currently, the FCC has no requirement to assess the potential environmental impact of launching so many satellites, including the effects on Earth’s atmosphere or the changes to the night sky it would cause.
“We are deeply concerned,” says Ruskin Hartley, CEO of DarkSky International. “We’re not against satellites, but we believe it needs to be done in a responsible way.”
The FCC allows the following satellite applications the public to expresswhich it did for SpaceX’s proposal less than a week after it was submitted—extremely quickly compared to typical months for other applications. The comment deadline is March 6, after which the FCC can spend months deciding whether to approve all, some or none of SpaceX’s satellites.
More than 350 comments have been submitted so far, with many astronomers expressing concerns about the effects on astronomy and Earth’s atmosphere. “A million satellites is absolutely terrifying,” he says Samantha Lawler at the University of Regina in Canada.
SpaceX has not released many details about the planned satellites, including their size or altitude. This left astronomers like Lawler unable to determine exactly what the impact of the constellation would be. “We’re trying to gather the information we need to write to the FCC,” he says.
In the worst-case scenario, she said, tens of thousands of satellites would be visible to the naked eye all night, and many times more would obscure the views of telescopes on Earth and in space. The satellites would also have to be continuously replenished, potentially every five years like SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, meaning on average one satellite would launch and re-enter the atmosphere every 3 minutes. Currently, only a handful of satellites re-enter Earth’s atmosphere each day.
This could be very damaging to the planet’s atmosphere. When satellites and rockets burn up, they produce aluminum oxide, or aluminum oxide, an ozone-depleting substance. “We’re talking teragrams. [1 trillion grams] of aluminum oxide,” Lawler says. “That would cause massive ozone depletion and possibly a change in the temperature of the stratosphere.”
The reason the FCC is not currently required to assess the environmental impacts of any satellite application, even if it does, is that its space activities are exempt from the US National Environmental Policy Act. If a significant problem emerges in the comments process, it could trigger closer scrutiny of the application, but it’s unclear whether that will happen, says Kevin Bell of the Free Information Group in Washington, DC.
“In an ideal world, [the FCC] they would study it,” Bell says, but “they don’t necessarily have the in-house scientific capacity to assess atmospheric impacts.”
The FCC and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.
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