SpaceX wants to launch many more satellites
Charles Boyer / Alamy Stock Photo
Astronomers are scrambling to determine the environmental impact of a SpaceX application to launch 1 million satellites, as the approval deadline fast approaches.
On January 30, SpaceX announced that it had applied to send a huge mega-constellation of 1 million satellites into space with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) of the United States, which CEO Elon Musk said would serve as orbital data centers for artificial intelligence.
The satellites would far outnumber anything else in orbit, with only 14,500 active satellites in space today. Currently, the FCC has no requirement to consider 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 are not opposed to satellites, but we believe it must be done in a responsible way.”
After satellite applications, the FCC allows members of the public to comment, which it did for SpaceX’s proposal less than a week after it was submitted — extremely quickly compared to the typical months for other applications. The deadline for comments is March 6, after which the FCC could spend months deciding whether to approve all, some or none of SpaceX’s satellites.
So far, more than 350 comments have been submitted, with many astronomers raising concerns about the effects on astronomy and Earth’s atmosphere. “A million satellites is absolutely terrifying,” says Samantha Lawler of the University of Regina in Canada.
SpaceX has not disclosed many details about the planned satellites, including size or height. That has left astronomers like Lawler unable to determine exactly what the impact of the constellation would be. “We’re scrambling to gather the information we need to write to the FCC,” she says.
In the worst case, tens of thousands of satellites would be visible to the naked eye all night, she says, and many times more would obscure the sights of telescopes on Earth and in space. The satellites also need to be continually replenished, potentially every five years like SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, meaning that on average one satellite will be launched and another will re-enter the atmosphere every three minutes. Currently, only a handful of satellites re-enter Earth’s atmosphere each day.
This can be hugely damaging to the planet’s atmosphere. When satellites and rockets burn up, they produce aluminum oxide, or alumina, a substance that destroys ozone. “We’re talking teragrams (1 trillion grams) of alumina,” Lawler says. “This will cause massive ozone depletion and possibly change the temperature of the stratosphere.”
The reason the FCC is not currently required to assess the environmental impact of any satellite application, even one of this scale, is because the space industry is exempt from the National Environmental Policy Act in the United States. If a significant issue is raised in the comment process, it could trigger closer scrutiny of an application, but it is not clear whether that will happen, says Kevin Bell of the Free Information Group in Washington DC.
“In an ideal world, (the FCC) would study it,” Bell says, but “they don’t necessarily have the in-house scientific capacity to judge atmospheric impacts”.
The FCC and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.
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