I remember the first time I saw a satellite. I was a teenager, standing in my light-polluted suburban yard and gazing up at the stars as usual. The satellite was a faint “star” moving slowly and smoothly in the sky, and as I looked at it, I felt a mixture of awe and wonder that such a thing could be seen – and that humans could orbit such an object. at all.
That was a lifetime ago, and now I look back on that evening more with uneasiness than nostalgia; My teenage naivety seems almost embarrassing.
That’s because, these days, the sight of one of those celestial travelers fills me with fear. We are firmly in the era of satellite constellations – clusters of dozens of identical satellites – and are currently entering the era of mega constellations, in which clusters of thousands of satellites roam the sky. Clusters of satellites started out small, but, like a viral outbreak, they grew without our noticing – and now we’re dealing with a pandemic.
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I wrote about this problem scientific American In May 2023. At that time, there were 7,500 active satellites orbiting Earth; More than half of them were SpaceX Starlink satellites that provided Internet service. In a little less than three years, the number of Starlink satellites in orbit alone has reached approximately 10,000. Today there are actually more Starlink satellites than the total number All Other operational satellites.
This ratio will almost certainly lean even more toward Starlink; In 2019, when the first Starlink satellite was launched, SpaceX applied with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for 30,000 additional satellites.
Does it feel bad? Well, there may come a day, very soon, when we will become indifferent to such a small number of satellites cluttering the sky. On January 30, 2026, SpaceX applied for permission to launch more than one million satellites.
yes, one million.
SpaceX plans to make this massive mega-constellation a distributed network serving as an orbital data center, similar to the ground-based data centers that provide the information processing backbone of the Internet. In this case, instead of having equipment capable of all that processing power stored in huge warehouses, each satellite in orbit will do a small part of the number crunching and then send the final results back to the ground.
In theory, such schemes could reduce the unsatisfied electricity demands and environmental impacts of ground-based stations. in 2023 Data centers in the US only It consumed an astonishing 176 million megawatt-hours of energy – a little more than 4 percent of the country’s annual electricity use and enough to power 16 million homes for a year. Many of these centers are powered by fossil fuels that add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere that increase global warming. These centers also need to be cooled, and to do so they usually consume large amounts of water. And as the use of computationally intensive artificial intelligence increases, so, too, will the appetite for more power – and the potential for environmental damage.
SpaceX claims that exporting most of the “compute” to orbit is how to break this vicious cycle. And there is some truth to this: The satellites will be powered by solar power, reducing demand for electricity on Earth. They would not need water to cool their hot chips, but would instead rely on large radiators to expel the heat – a slower, less efficient method but the best method available in the near-vacuum of space. Starlink satellites currently in use already cool themselves this way, and The heat load for the satellite used to process the data will be approximately the same As it was used to provide the Internet, it is not the showstopper problem many people believe it to be.
So, if you don’t look too deeply, massive orbital data centers may make sense. However, scratching the surface of this idea reveals just how terrible it is.
First, those satellites are needed to get to space. As my friend and colleague, astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell explainsSpaceX claims that its Starship rocket (once it passes testing) can carry 150 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, but there are good reasons to think that actual operational capacity will prove to exceed 100 metric tons. Assuming that truly low-Earth orbit is where all the satellites will go (and many will undoubtedly need to fly higher), and each of them is two metric tons, that means Starship could launch about 50 satellites at a time — so this mega constellation is also in the making. Very Optimistic assumptions will require some 20,000 starships launched.
It gets worse: These satellites will fail after a few years and need to be replaced. Finally, maintenance of this projected million-satellite mega constellation may be in order 10 starship launches per day, forever.
The environmental impact of all this will not be insignificant. A single Starship launch emits the equivalent of 76,000 metric tons of carbon dioxideFor example, leave aside the issues of noise pollution and potential damage to nearby habitats. Twenty thousand launches including More damage to our vital ozone layer. Furious atmospheric reentry of satellites would also be a source of pollution, dumping significant quantity of vaporized metals and plastics in our planet’s fragile upper atmosphere. At least one Starlink satellite is already burning this way Every dayDepending on when these satellites begin to enter orbit and their planned replacement cycles – and orbital data centers – this re-entry rate could skyrocket.
As if this were not enough, the proliferation of mega-constellations also carries risks to the orbital environment. The amount of satellites overhead is already huge, but the number of proposed satellites is so vast that managing space traffic to avoid collisions will become an even bigger task. Even a single confrontation in the classroom can be disastrous; These satellites are moving many times faster than a rifle bullet, and a direct hit from one would create a cloud of shrapnel. That debris spreads out, colliding with other satellites and creating even more debris, resulting in a violent cascade called Kessler syndrome. Triggering this syndrome is already a real concern, despite orbital decay naturally occurring “cleansing” of low-Earth orbit over time. Increasing the number of satellites several thousand times could make this threat even worse.
And as an astronomer, I can’t help but be concerned about the impact on the field I love. A study published last December Nature showed that if there were approximately half a million satellites in orbit, at least one would inevitably contaminate every observation taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Ground-based telescopes will also be severely affected; they are already now! vaporized reentry debris This would also increase the brightness of the sky, making faint cosmic objects more difficult to see. Even simple stargazing from your backyard will be affected. In truth, by launching so many satellites we risk losing the sky.
Keep in mind that SpaceX isn’t the only one crowding the sky. China has applied to launch 200,000 satellites for its network. No doubt other countries and companies will follow suit; Amazon and Blue Origin already There are also plans to launch thousands of satellites in each. Even more worrying is a new company, called Reflect Orbital, that wants to launch thousands of giant space mirrors into orbit to provide “sunlight on demand” anywhere on Earth. The rays will be much brighter than the full moon And, even if carefully pointed, too bright will scatter in the atmosphere as off-beams, disrupting wildlife and effectively destroying the sky’s remaining natural beauty by erasing the stars from our vision. these are mirrors really a terrible idea.
In fact, that’s the common theme here. All these launches and re-entry also have another impact to ignore – extremely disturbing environmental and light pollution. Our night sky—and this Is Ours – a natural wonder, a cosmic park that we need to protect, not exploit with a laissez-faire attitude. This reckless exploitation of the heavens above is a real danger to us all.
If all this scares you as much as it does me, then make your voice heard. The FCC is taking public comments on Reflect Orbital’s filing until March 9, 2026, and on SpaceX’s MegaConstellation until March 6 (the day this article is published). The American Astronomical Society has more information and linksas well as Instructions on how to submit a comment. I did it!
