Astronomers are warning that the proliferation of satellite constellations like SpaceX’s Starlink, are making their work harder than it’s ev
Donald Trump has spent eight months attempting to remake the United States through a massive programme of cuts and deregulation. His administration has left almost no part of American life untouched – from classrooms to college campuses, offices to factory floors; museums, forests, oceans and even the stars.
An executive order signed last month to streamline rocket launches has been celebrated by officials in the commercial space sector, who see it as integral to securing America’s primacy as the world leader in space exploration.
But it’s also causing a wave of alarm – from scientists, environmental activists and astronomers, who say a growing network of satellite constellations are crowding the skies, obscuring the stars and threatening our very access to Earth’s orbit.
Starlink alone owns two-thirds of all satellites in space. With 8,000 in low Earth orbit, the company currently has permission to launch a further 4,000, and has reportedly filed paperwork to raise the total number to 42,000. Amazon and a state-backed project from China have their own rivals to Starlink in the works, all of which would see the numbers vastly multiply, with some estimates that in a decade there could be 100,000 satellites in orbit.
Trump has appeared to back the expansion of America’s commercial space industry, signing an executive order last month that could accelerate the number of rockets and their massive payloads of new satellites, potentially exacerbating the difficulties for astronomers and bringing unintended environmental damage.
Commercial space operations have grown in scale and ambition since the US stepped back from government backed flights and increasingly turned to private companies like SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin. In recent years, government efforts to regulate the industry have struggled to keep pace with the ambition of these companies operations: in the last four years, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has issued more commercial space licenses than it did in the entire 32 years before 2021.
At various points, the companies themselves have expressed frustration with the government’s regulatory regime – Elon Musk himself threatened to sue the FAA last year for “overreach”.
Trump’s August executive order would seeks to eliminate some environmental reviews and launch safety measures contained in previous regulations produced by the president’s first administration, while also preempting some state laws that could hinder the development of private space ports.
The proliferation of “space junk” in orbit is also of concern to experts. There are about 43,000 objects being monitored in space, most of which are debris from old rockets and disused satellites. The European Space Agency estimates that there are an addition 1.2 million tiny objects between 1cm and 10cm wide.
The risk of a runaway collision of debris – a phenomenon known as Kessler Syndrome – is thought to be increasing as the number of satellites multiplies. In such a scenario, one collision sets off a chain reaction which would see more debris produced, until a critical mass of cascading collisions renders orbit inaccessible.
Global communications company Viasat paints a cataclysmic picture of the world after such an event: “All of humanity would watch helplessly as space junk multiplies uncontrollably. Without timely intervention, we risk bringing the Space Age to an inglorious end, and trapping humanity on Earth under a layer of its own trash for centuries, or even millennia.”
Companies like Starlink are acting to mitigate such an event by building in avoidance systems that manoeuvre their satellites around potential collisions, while scrapping older models that are more at risk.
The real risk, [Astronomer Samantha Lawler] says, will come when the thousands of Starlinks competitor satellites are in orbit in a few years time, with question over how they will coordinate and share data so that other operators know they’re there.
Despite some astronomers calling for a moratorium on rocket launches, Starlink and its celestial competitors show no sign of pausing their ambitions.
Starlink appears to be aware of the effects it satellites have of the work of astronomers and has made efforts to make them fainter in the sky. But Lawler says at the same time, the objects have become bigger, “so it just cancels out.”
Lawler says it may take a serious collision in orbit to focus the minds of politicians and policymakers to the danger of deregulated commercial space operations, likening such a scenario to a cataclysmic news event like the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.
“I really am afraid that something very bad has to happen before things will change.”
