The new space race
Maybe you’ve looked at the sky on a clear night and spotted the International Space Station, a tiny white dot gliding through the stars. Maybe it felt special, a rare glimpse of a human-made satellite in space.
But what if you were to look up at the sky and see more visible satellites than stars? What if the Big Dipper and Orion were drowned out by a satellite traffic jam, criss-crossing through space?
A growing number of astronomers are sounding the alarm about such a possibility, even within the next decade. A new space race is already well underway. Commercial satellite traffic in low Earth orbit has skyrocketed in recent years, with more satellites launched into space than ever before. The majority of these satellites are owned and operated by a single company: Starlink.
Featuring Samantha Lawler, Jonathan McDowell, Aaron Boley, and Roohi Dalal, with thanks to Edward Oughton.
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LINKS
Here’s a link to the most popular proceedings in the FCC docket, and a step-by-step guide for submitting your own comments (this guide was compiled for a previous filing by an advocacy group which includes Samantha Lawler).
COMPASSE, or the Committee for the Protection of Astronomy and the Space Environment, also stays up-to-date on FCC procedures.
In this episode, Nate and Justine looked at this 3D rendering of satellite constellations around the globe, including GPS and Starlink.
Space Data Navigator has nice visualizations of the number of launches, satellites, and debris over time, which relies in part on Jonathan McDowell’s data.
Aaron Boley’s article in Nature, “Satellite mega-constellations create risks in Low Earth Orbit, the atmosphere and on Earth.”
A talk by Samantha Lawler about Kuiper belt objects and the challenges to astronomy posed by sharp increase in satellites.
Fragments of a SpaceX spacecraft which landed on a farmer’s field Saskatchewan, about an hour from Samantha Lawler’s house. Credit: Samantha Lawler, with permission.
An open-access paper which found that internet from satellite mega-constellations could be up to 12-14 times more emission-intensive than terrestrial broadband.
For more from Outside/In on the “earth-space environmental system,” check out our episode on property rights in airspace and space-space, this one on the element of aluminum, and an oldie-but-a-goodie on geoengineering.
A piece on the cutting room floor: the risk that you’ll get hit by satellite debris falling back to Earth is quite low… but the risk that someone will get hit is rising.
Here’s a global map of light pollution, and a tool to find dark sky sites near you.
On the issue of orbital crowding, there have been a couple notable traffic jams in space. Last month, a decommissioned Russian satellite disintegrated in low Earth orbit, posing potential risks to astronauts on board the ISS. In 2019, an important weather-monitoring satellite had to dodge a Starlink satellite, a fuel-expensive maneuver. In 2021, Starlink and OneWeb debated what really happened when their satellites passed within 190 feet of each other in orbit.
A note on space regulation
Our episode did not cover all the groups regulating space. At a global level, this includes the UN’s International Telecommunication Union and the UN Office of Outer Space Affairs. Within the United States, the Office of Space Commerce also plays a role, in addition to the Federal Aviation Administration and the Federal Communications Commission.
CREDITS
Outside/In host: Nate Hegyi
Reported, produced, and mixed by Justine Paradis
Edited by Taylor Quimby
Our team also includes Felix Poon.
NHPR’s Director of Podcasts is Rebecca Lavoie
Music in this episode came from Victor Lundberg, Lofive, Harbours & Oceans, Spiegelstadt, Curved Mirror, Silver Maple, Wave Saver, Cobby Costa, and From Now On.
The blue whale calls were recorded by NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.
If you’ve got a question for the Outside/Inbox hotline, give us a call! We’re always looking for rabbit holes to dive down. Leave us a voicemail at: 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837). Don’t forget to leave a number so we can call you back.
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Audio Transcript: The new space race
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
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Justine Paradis: Hey Nate.
Nate Hegyi: Hey Justine.
Justine Paradis: Do you remember when Pluto was a planet?
Nate Hegyi: Yes. Yeah. My like my entire childhood, it was a planet.
Justine Paradis: Yeah, canonically.
Nate Hegyi: In fact, if I'm being completely honest with you it still is like a planet to me. Pluto is still a planet.
Justine Paradis: Yes. But officially, Pluto is now considered a “dwarf planet” slash Kuiper belt object. The type of object studied by astronomers like Samantha Lawler.
Samantha Lawler: I study, uh, the Kuiper belt, uh, and the orbits of Kuiper Belt objects. So these are small, icy bodies out beyond Neptune.
And to study them, Samanatha needs to use a super powerful telescope, this one is on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. This is the kind of telescope that astronomers have to apply to use. It costs thousands of dollars an hour to operate, and getting time with it is quite competitive.
Samantha Lawler: We take a picture of a spot on the sky, you know, a really long time exposure picture, usually like five minutes or more, um, and then come back an hour later and take another picture and come back an hour later and take another picture and see what moves.
Justine Paradis: But lately, something's been interfering with these images.
Nate Hegyi: Uh oh.
Justine Paradis: I want you to take a look at this picture and tell me what you see.
Nate Hegyi: I see a blast of white light.
MUSIC: Stay in Orbit, Victor Lundberg
Nate Hegyi: It honestly looks like someone shot a laser beam across the night sky.
Justine Paradis: So, what this is, this streak that Samantha’s seeing – are satellites, which are essentially photobombing her research.
Samantha Lawler: The typical satellites that fly through are millions of times brighter than the Kuiper Belt objects that we're trying to to find… So it effectively cuts down the area of the imager. Right? So it means that we have to take more time to do the same science.
Justine Paradis: It's not ruining her research at this point. But it is happening more often and it's slowing her down.
Nate Hegyi: It's annoying.
Justine Paradis: It’s annoying. And if it keeps getting worse, she says that this is a problem that ultimately…
Samantha Lawler: … is going to affect every aspect of astronomy.
MUSIC OUT
Justine Paradis: And one of the main reasons this is happening more often… is because of Starlink.
Commercial clip: Starlink uses the world’s most advanced satellite technology to deliver high-speed low latency internet all over the world. [fade out]
Justine Paradis: So, Starlink’s a satellite internet company. It’s a subsidiary of SpaceX, of which, of course, Elon Musk is CEO. Their whole pitch is to provide high-speed internet, with low latency, aka lag, available almost everywhere on Earth.
MUSIC: Kaleidoscope, Lofive
And they do this by rocketing a lot of satellites into orbit, each of which literally beams a broadband signal down from space. And this could be huge, especially for the third of the global population which still does not have access to the internet. Last year, the Biden administration awarded millions of dollars in grants to tribal communities, money that will be spent to use Starlink to deliver broadband internet to remote villages in Alaska.
Starlink is also playing a role in world events.
News clip: As Ukraine tries to drive back Russian forces, it has one big advantage in its effort… Starlink internet satellites provided by the Elon Musk company, SpaceX…
As of this spring, according to SpaceX, Starlink is now used by over 3 million people. But as all this has been going on, one group has been trying to sound an alarm.
MUSIC: Yhello, Lofive
Samantha Lawler: I hate it. I’ve never wanted to be wrong more.
Jonathan McDowell: The degree of increase in what’s happening in space near us is just insane.
Aaron Boley: It's just a tremendous rate of change, and we are changing the sky.
Nate Hegyi: This is Outside/In. I’m Nate Hegyi. Our producer Justine Paradis spoke with astronomers about the new space race which could blanket the night sky with satellites.
Jonathan McDowell: So the whole sky would be sort of moving, like you were right under the flight path of a major airport.
Justine Paradis: What this means for astronomy, our atmosphere and what we see when we look up at the sky.
Nate Hegyi: Stay tuned.
MUSIC OUT
Justine Paradis: Nate. While I was reporting this episode, I learned so much cool nerd stuff about space.
Nate Hegyi: [laughs] Like what? Gimme one.
Justine Paradis: Yeah, one of them is about what it actually means to be in orbit, or one way to think about it, at least. It's basically falling around the Earth. When you're launching a satellite, you launch up and then you boost sideways until you get to orbital speed, which is around 17,000 miles an hour.
Jonathan McDowell: You're going so fast sideways that by the time you fall down a mile, the earth has curved away from you by a mile because it's round and you haven't gotten any closer, and so you can fall all the way around the earth without ever getting any lower. And that's what orbit is.
Nate Hegyi: That is fascinating. Thank you, gravity.
Justine Paradis: So, this is Jonathan McDowell. He is an astronomer who studies black holes and quasars.
Nate Hegyi: Cool job.
Jonathan McDowell: But I also study the history and policy of the space program and track all the different satellites that are in space.
Justine Paradis: So satellite internet isn’t new. But until recently, it’s got a reputation for not being very good. Right?
Nate Hegyi: Right.
Justine Paradis: And that’s because the satellites that provided it were relatively far out into space. So, I want you to look at this website and tell me what you see.
Nate Hegyi: Okay. I'm clicking on it. What I see is a map of the Earth, like the whole globe.
MUSIC: Holocene, Harbours & Oceans
Nate Hegyi: And then all these little white dots around it with names like Kosmos 1710 or Chinasat 32.
Justine Paradis: Now click on click on the globe and spin it around.
Nate Hegyi: Whee! Whoa, 3D.
Justine Paradis: Yeah, see where they all are?
Nate Hegyi: Like, that's a lot of satellites.
Justine Paradis: Yeah, these these are the GPS satellites. Okay. So these are all satellites that are out around, ten thousand or more miles out into orbit.
Nate Hegyi: Okay.
Justine Paradis: So, there’s a lot of space out in space! The older internet satellites are out even further than this.
Jonathan McDowell: Up until now, most communications satellites have been in much higher orbit, where you only need a couple of satellites to see basically the whole Earth.
Justine Paradis: But Starlink’s internet is faster because it’s way closer to the surface, in what we call low Earth orbit, so just a few hundred miles up.
MUSIC OUT
Nate Hegyi: Okay.
Justine Paradis: The issue is:
Jonathan McDowell: You need a lot more satellites to be sure that there are a bunch overhead at any one place at any one time.
Justine Paradis: So Nate, I want you to click on that link in the corner that switches the view from GPS satellites to Starlink.
Nate Hegyi: Starlink, okay. WHOA. Whoa. That's a ton. I mean, I am looking at literally thousands of little white dots. It makes Earth look like a pincushion.
Justine Paradis: It's like, it's like looking at an ant colony, almost.
MUSIC OUT
Jonathan McDowell: And that part, the part that we mostly call low Earth orbit, is actually finite. It's big, but it's sufficiently finite that we're starting to have a real impact on it.
Justine Paradis: Starlink is the first of what some are calling a satellite “mega constellation.” According to Jonathan’s data, Starlink has more than 6000 satellites in orbit right now. And this is just the beginning.
MUSIC: Fresh Pastries, Lofive
Jonathan McDowell: Amazon, a company that some people may have heard of, is planning to deploy 3000 satellites.
Justine Paradis: Their internet is called Project Kuiper.
Nate Hegyi: Is that named after the Kuiper belt?
Justine Paradis: It is indeed!
Nate Hegyi: Cool.
Justine Paradis: In Europe, there’s a company called Eutelsat – their mega constellation is called OneWeb. And China too has announced a national satellite megaconstellation, of 13,000 satellites.
Nate Hegyi: Thirteen thousand?!
Jonathan McDowell: And with the use of Starlink in the Ukraine war … a lot of militaries around the world are looking at having systems of their own.
Justine Paradis: To put all of this into perspective, from the first satellite, Sputnik in 1957, all the way to 2019 when Starlink started launching – we had only gotten to about 2000 satellites in orbit worldwide, in all human history. And now:
Jonathan McDowell: There are now more like 8000. And within ten years, we're expecting 50,000 to maybe 100,000. And so the degree of increase in, in what's happening in space near us is, is just insane, it’s huge.
MUSIC SWELL AND FADE
Nate Hegyi: Is this just like the Wild West in space? Is there any governing body that is like dealing with Starlink and these satellites?
Justine Paradis: Okay, yes, as an American company, SpaceX needs to get permission to launch rockets from the FAA, which is in charge of flight in the US. It also has to file with the FCC which is in charge of broadcast and satellite communications in the United States. We’re gonna get way more into this later, but you're right. What we have is, at best, a patchwork approach to governing space.
Nate Hegyi: Gotcha.
Justine Paradis: Okay. I want to introduce you to a couple more star people.
Nate Hegyi: Okay.
Justine Paradis: Aaron Boley –
Aaron Boley: I am a planetary astronomer, and I'm also the co-director of the Outer Space Institute.
Justine Paradis: And Roohi Dalal, an astronomer with a special focus on space policy and national security.
Roohi Dalal: And I generally just work on trying to make outer space more safe, secure, and sustainable from an environmental perspective.
Justine Paradis: Like Aaron, Roohi is also involved with the Outer Space Institute, and that’s a non-profit dedicated to the safe and sustainable use of space.
Nate Hegyi: OK.
Justine Paradis: They told me the big shift here is not just the NUMBER of new satellites – but it’s also their design.
Roohi Dalal: The model that's existed up until now is that we build these very big, expensive satellites. Uh, and we expect them to last decades.
Justine Paradis: So, once upon a time, satellites were quite expensive and valuable. You wanted them to stick around. But a Starlink satellite is designed to be in service for just 5 years.
Nate Hegyi: Just five years?!
Justine Paradis: After that, they get pulled back into earth’s atmosphere and incinerate.
Nate Hegyi: Like a meteoroid.
Aaron Boley: The change that we're seeing with mega-constellations is an application of the consumer electronic model to space.
Justine Paradis: So astronomers are alarmed by all these changes for a few reasons. And let’s start with: space traffic.
MUSIC: Particle Emission, Silver Maple
Justine Paradis: Groups like the US Space Force, and also individuals like Jonathan McDowell, pay close attention to all this stuff zipping around in space. And that’s because of the risk of collisions.
Jonathan McDowell: If you bump, that's bad because at 17,000 miles an hour, it's kind of a fender bender.
Justine Paradis: There's a lot of debris up there already right, like –
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Justine Paradis: The smallest size that a Space Force sensor can detect and track is about the size of a softball. But there are estimated 130 million pieces of debris way smaller than that in space. Less than a centimeter.
Nate Hegyi: So, 17,000 miles an hour: a bullet travels about 7000 mph. So that's like twice the speed of a bullet. So if you're thinking about this, out in space, there are all these tiny bullets just flying around.
Justine Paradis: The worst case scenario here is something known as Kessler syndrome.
Jonathan McDowell: A runaway chain reaction where all the satellites start hitting each other. If anyone saw the movie “Gravity” it’s kinda like that.
MUSIC OUT
Gravity scene: [Sandra Bullock and George Clooney freaking out]
Justine Paradis: Some say that fears of Kessler Syndrome are overblown.
Nate Hegyi: Mhm.
Justine Paradis: But Roohi says that even one collision is a big deal.
Roohi Dalal: Let's say, for example, a small piece of debris that we aren't able to see hits a satellite, but it's small enough that it doesn't cause the satellite to explode. Uh, it just… puts a hole through it. Almost like a bullet. … and the satellite goes down. But we haven't seen the debris and we haven't seen an explosion happen. So what if we assume that there's a cyber attack… if it were a satellite that detects, uh, the launch of nuclear missiles, then maybe we assume that that cyber attack was carried out to blind us to an incoming nuclear attack. And so we have to decide within ten minutes whether or not to launch our own nuclear missiles. I think that's a particularly dangerous scenario, but one that's not entirely unrealistic.
Nate Hegyi: That’s a lot of assumptions that would have to be made, I think, to bring us to the brink of nuclear war based on one satellite going down. I hope that the governments of the world aren't that quick to make those very consequential decisions.
Justine Paradis: Yeah, I hope so too. Um, that is a particularly dangerous scenario. But we have there are many other really important satellites up there and defense satellites, like –
Nate Hegyi: Right.
Justine Paradis: It is an international like, um, problem. Right?
Nate Hegyi: What happens, so if it's bigger than a softball, do these satellites have like little jets that they can, like, scooch out of the way? Or is it just like, okay, there is something coming. We can't move. There goes Kosmos 521, adios!
Justine Paradis: Well, it depends on the satellite, right? Some, some do. And, you know, SpaceX says they obviously don't want collisions either. It’s their whole business to do business in space, beyond Starlink. You know, they’ve got a contract with NASA to deliver astronauts to the ISS. And they also now build satellites specifically for the military under the umbrella of their partner project, Starshield.
Nate Hegyi: Okay.
Justine Paradis: So, to that end, Starlink satellites are equipped with “onboard autonomous collision avoidance systems.”
Nate Hegyi: Dammit, I was I was hoping you were going to say lasers that just shot the little softball-sized space debris out of the sky.
Justine Paradis: But they, they do have to use these collision avoidance systems all the time.
Jonathan McDowell: More and more frequently now, they have to dodge.
Every six months, SpaceX has to file a report with the FCC documenting the number of times that their satellites have to perform avoidance maneuvers. And in their latest, they reported their satellites had to do that over 24,000 times, about six per satellite.
Nate Hegyi: Wow.
MUSIC: Zombies From Outer Space, Wave Saver
Justine Paradis: You could argue – and indeed Starlink does argue – that the number of maneuvers is a good thing because it demonstrates how safety-conscious they are. But with every passing month, there are more satellites up there. So, just to invoke the Hunger Games real quick – may the odds ever be in our favor.
MUSIC SWELL AND OUT
Nate Hegyi: So, at this point, there’s are literally thousands of these Starlink satellites zooming around space, dodging debris. How big are they, by the way? Are we talking the size of a car or like what?
Justine Paradis: Okay, so a lot of the older internet satellites before Starlink were pretty small.
Nate Hegyi: Uhhuh.
Justine Paradis: One astronomer compared them to the size of a footlong hotdog. But Starlink wants their satellites to be more powerful, so they’re bigger. One of their designs is called the V2 mini. It weighs around 2000 pounds, which is about half the weight of a Ford150. And when its solar panels are unfurled, its wingspan is almost 100 feet wide.
Nate Hegyi: 100 feet wide, like what is that?
Justine Paradis: It’s around the length of a blue whale!
Blue whale sfx
Justine Paradis: The full size V2 satellites are even bigger.
Nate Hegyi: So very light blue whales are flying around space right now.
Blue whale sfx
Justine Paradis: Not only are they big: they’re also made of metal, which is super reflective. Making them very bright. And they’re also loud – that is, very active on many radio frequencies, which is an issue if you’re a radio astronomer. So, needless to say, astronomers like Samantha Lawler are not happy.
Samantha Lawler: It's extremely emotional, right? Like, uh, both. Like I'm watching my scientific data get degraded by a private company… I also teach a lot… and one of the things that I love to talk about is how many exoplanets we have discovered… and just a couple of weeks ago, we crossed the point where there are more Starlinks in orbit than than, uh, exoplanets that have been… discovered in, I don't know, 35 years… it seems that Starlink is winning.
Justine Paradis: By the way, I did reach out to SpaceX, Starlink’s parent company, for comment, and they did not respond. And as I’ve already mentioned, Starlink is far from the only player active in low Earth orbit right now. There’s lots of others, including the US Department of Defense.
Nate Hegyi: Right.
Justine Paradis: But as of right now, Starlink does have more satellites in orbit than everyone else on the planet combined. And as far as the issues astronomers are raising, Starlink is aware of this stuff and has tried to make adjustments to their satellites. They painted one black as a test, which did help – but it overheated and fried.
Nate Hegyi: hah!
Justine Paradis: They tried adding visors to make them fainter, but it still wasn’t quite faint enough. And in the latest generation, Starlink is experimenting with changing the orientation of the satellites and adding a new coating to make them less reflective.
A couple of the astronomers I spoke with sounded pleasantly surprised by Starlink’s attempts here. But the thing is: while the FCC has directed them to work with astronomers on these points, Starlink doesn’t strictly have to meet any specific guidelines.
Roohi Dalal: I think right now it's sort of at the best efforts level, but best efforts can only go so far when there isn't necessarily a financial incentive behind that.
Nate Hegyi: Already, so it’s a little loosey goosey.
Justine Paradis: Yeah, the official term, loosey goosey.
Nate Hegyi: [laughs]
MUSIC: Vibrant, Lofive
Justine Paradis: So the last concern for now, I'd say, isn't just about research. It's also just about being a human being. You know, I grew up, uh, on an island. And one of the best things about this are the dark skies. Like, on a clear night, you could see the Milky Way a lot of the time, right? Um, I was actually out there recently and was kind of having a sleepless night, as one does, in one's 30s. [laughs]
Nate Hegyi: [laughs]
Justine Paradis: And, um, I realized it was a no moon night, and it was clear –
Sleepy Justine: Just letting my eyes get used to the sky and… I can see the Milky Way… It’s profoundly comforting and inspiring…
Nate Hegyi: I've had those, similar moments. I was just in the, um, Red Rock Desert of Utah, you know, looking probably at that same Milky Way.
Justine Paradis: Mhm.
Nate Hegyi: To play devil's advocate on, on the satellites, though: we've been experiencing disruptions to what is ‘natural’ in our viewshed for a very long time, right? Like whether it's light pollution from a city, whether it is, um, a road cutting through an otherwise beautiful mountain vista. And I don't feel, when I see, and I see the Starlink satellites go by – it does not feel nearly as disruptive to me as how many stars get blanked out by the lights of Great Falls, Montana, thirty miles to the west.
Justine Paradis: I hear you. But in some scenarios, it takes it to a whole ‘nother level. Imagine a future where there are as many visible satellites in the night sky as there are visible stars.
MUSIC: Quantum Mechanics, Silver Maple
Jonathan McDowell: So the whole sky would be sort of moving, like you were right under the flight path of a major airport. Uh, or and worse, I think, is that the fainter satellites, there would be even more of them, would be just at the limit of your vision. So the sky would seem to be like seething or swimming.
Roohi Dalal: This isn't just about astronomy… It's also about preserving our cultural heritage of the night sky. Uh, it's about animal migration. Uh, the light pollution from satellites can affect the migration of insects, for example… This is really fundamentally potentially changing humanity's relationship with space and the night sky.
Nate Hegyi: Coming up: how all these satellites may be an unintentional experiment in geoengineering. That’s in a minute.
MUSIC SWELL AND FADE
BREAK
Nate Hegyi: Welcome back to Outside/In. I’m Nate Hegyi here with our producer Justine Paradis. And in the last half, we talked about how satellite megaconstellations could impact orbit and astronomy, the night sky itself… but now, it’s time to talk about how they might change the planet.
MUSIC: Plan C, Cobby Costa
Justine Paradis: Yes. So, in the late nineties, NASA flew a high altitude plane through the exhaust plumes of space shuttles, just minutes after they launched. They wanted to know what was happening in those plumes in the upper atmosphere. And what they found were tiny ozone holes.
MUSIC SWELL
Justine Paradis: These ozone holes were small, and the number of launches was low. Because of that, the environmental impact of space exploration just didn’t seem like a big deal.
MUSIC FADE
Nate Hegyi: But that’s not true anymore.
Justine Paradis: So that’s why // A lot of people are concerned about this sharp increase in space activity over the past few years – not only because every launch involves a lot of emissions, but also – all those disposable satellites are burning up in the atmosphere upon reentry.
MUSIC: Immer Zusammen, Spiegalstadt
Now, meteoroids burn up, or ablate, in the mesosphere all the time. 54 tons every day. But these satellites are made from very different stuff. Astronomer Aaron Boley coauthored a paper published in Nature, covering these risks to the upper atmosphere.
Aaron Boley: Aluminum is a major component of the satellites. And so when that ablates, it doesn't just disappear… We think it will turn into mostly alumina and settle then into the stratosphere, where it will have the same type of impact that we think will happen from the exhaust, from solid motors.
Justine Paradis: The irony here is that there are people who have actually proposed deliberately putting aluminum into the upper atmosphere as a geoengineering strategy to cool down the planet. It’s a very controversial idea, not at all proven.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah I was gonna say! Yeah, yeah. Geoengineering [skeptical sigh]...
Justine Paradis: So, this geoengineering-by-satellite-disposal is essentially an uncontrolled experiment.
Nate Hegyi: Mhm.
Justine Paradis: Again, we really, really don’t know what is going to happen here. But one thing Aaron and many others are worried about is that all of this alumina could kick off a chemical reaction that – surprise surprise – makes more holes in the ozone.
MUSIC SWELL AND FADE
Justine Paradis: Ultimately, the point a lot of astronomers are making – is that we need to shift our thinking around space. They’re saying it’s not an infinite, lifeless vaccuum, separate from this planet – instead, orbit and space should be thought of as part of earth’s environment.
Aaron Boley: No one is saying we shouldn't have satellites. We're saying, should we have 100,000 satellites? Should we have 10,000 satellites? Should we have 1000 satellites?
Nate Hegyi: It feels like every time like w e introduce a new technology into our world, we’re always, like, taken aback. I think about when cars started to become more widespread, it was before we had any traffic laws. It was really dangerous on the roads, fuel efficiency standards were nonexistent. I mean, Cars didn’t even have windshield wipers for a while!
Justine Paradis: [laughs]
Nate Hegyi: Like, real regulations only come after people start saying, ‘whoa, this is wild.’
Justine Paradis: Yeah, it takes a while to catch up, I guess, with every new technology. I totally think that seeing this as a regulatory conundrum is part of it, right? So let’s talk about how orbital space is regulated. Because, yeah, the future we’ve laid out about the seething sky is not the only possibility here.
MUSIC: Like Water or Something, Lofive
So right now, space is fundamentally governed by global agreements. The landmark one is the Outer Space Treaty.
Nate Hegyi: That totally sounds like it’s out of Star Trek. The Outer Space Treaty.
Justine Paradis: I know! It’s actually a really cool document. It emphasizes that space is for peace, it’s for exploration and it’s not occupation, and you have to share it.
Nate Hegyi: Very Star Trek.
Justine Paradis: Very Star Trek. But each country is responsible for regulating their own space activity. And these agreements were written in a Cold War era, when it was mostly STATES putting stuff into orbit. But these days, we’ve got Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and their companies in space. And so these UN agreements are straining under the weight of this era of space commercialization.
So, maybe we need new agreements, or add-ons. Maybe that takes the form of carrying capacity to orbit, or limits for each country. But – and here’s Roohi Dalal again –
Roohi Dalal: We do need to have global agreements. Um, I would say right now, I do feel like there is an onus on the US to take the first step just because we are licensing just so many constellations, that I think we have a responsibility…
Justine Paradis: The fact is, the US is putting more satellites than anyone right now.
Nate Hegyi: Okay, so like what are WE doing? What’s happening in the US?
Justine Paradis: As we talked about earlier, rocket launches are overseen by the FAA. They have an eye on impacts to endangered species, wetlands, even emissions to a certain altitude. And then when the satellites get into orbit – the FCC takes over. Because they regulate communications, which includes satellite communications. And they’ve also kind of stepped in to try to prevent collisions, sort of by default. Although that could be considered a stretch because they’re…
Roohi Dalal: technically, only responsible for the communications aspects of satellite operation… I'm very thankful that they've interpreted that as extending to things like orbital debris, because someone needs to regulate that.
Justine Paradis: But that actually leaves this giant gap in the upper atmosphere.
Roohi Dalal: And so there's kind of this no man's land that exists in terms of the upper atmosphere, where it seems like neither the FCC, because they do on orbit, uh, regulations nor the FAA seem to really have the authority to think about that.
Nate Hegyi: So, no agency is really taking ownership over the aluminum getting dumped into the mesosphere – these potential environmental impacts on the ozone layer.
Justine Paradis: Right. But still, the FCC is where the lion's share of the process is happening right now… so, when it comes to our question here of: is space an environment? And if so, shouldn’t it be regulated by the National Environmental Protection Act? So far, the FCC has said no, but…
MUSIC: Clearer Views, From Now On
Aaron Boley: That is coming. It is slowly coming.
Justine Paradis: There is a sense that the status quo can’t last.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Justine Paradis: In 2022, the Government Accountability Office, which is an independent watchdog agency that works for Congress, they came out with a report saying the “FCC should reexamine its environmental review process for large constellations of satellites.” That is literally the title of their report.
Nate Hegyi: [laughs] So the answer’s right there! That’s how you deliver your message concisely. That’s a focus sentence right there.
Justine Paradis: But with the Supreme Court’s reversal of Chevron, there’s a lot of uncertainty around enforcing environmental regulations going forward. And meanwhile, Roohi thinks that ultimately, what might move the needle here is defense concerns. Because even if the Department of Defense isn’t too worried about negative impacts on astronomy research…
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Justine Paradis: They are definitely not going to be happy if a spy satellite goes down because some space junk crashed into it.
Nate Hegyi: Right, right.
Roohi Dalal: As much as I would like us to maybe change how we're operating because we want to preserve the night sky as it is this cultural heritage of the night sky, realistically, um, I think what's actually going to make a difference is when questions of national security are raised.
MUSIC SWELL AND OUT
Nate Hegyi: So, Justine – as a society, we have done this before. I mean, we’ve come together as a planet to tackle collective problems which can’t be solved by one country all by itself. We have got global agreements about the ocean, about telecommunications… and even the ozone! I mean, there was a giant hole in the ozone layer created by harmful chemicals and every single country on the planet came together to sign the Montreal Protocol, banning them.
Justine Paradis: I mean, that is a great success story. There’s actually an idea to address the impact of all this space traffic – which is to amend the Montreal Protocol, to take that into account.
Nate Hegyi: Oh cool.
Justine Paradis: I want to end on something Jonathan McDowell said, the astronomer who tracks objects in space in his spare time. We talked in the morning, and he was literally facing budget cuts and news of potential future layoffs that afternoon.
Nate Hegyi: Ugh.
Justine Paradis: Yet, the entire time we talked, he had this serene, gentle smile on his face.
Jonathan McDowell: I think there is a way for the astronomers and environmentalists and the space companies to live together and find a, a workable compromise…
Justine Paradis: You sound so optimistic.
Jonathan McDowell: I mean, I think it can be done. Whether it will be done is another matter… I do believe that many people in the space companies also care about these issues. It's not all about making money, but a lot of it is… and, you know, the thing that might save us is this issue of the overcrowding and the potential for collisions, because if that starts to affect the satellite companies bottom lines, then they'll need to do something about it, right? Uh, so… there are hopeful possibilities on the horizon, and there are scary possibilities on the horizon. Uh, and we'll just have to to wait and see and work as best we can to to try and turn things in the hopeful direction.
MUSIC: The Arcade, Lofive
CREDITS
Justine Paradis: Before we go, I want to share one more thing. When companies like SpaceX file for permission to have satellites in orbit with the FCC. The FCC has public comment periods for those filings.
Aaron Boley: And if you have the expertise to comment on it, whether it's from the legal aspect, whether it's from a scientific aspect or a social aspect, you can comment and you should feel empowered to do so.
Nate Hegyi: If this episode piqued your interest and you’re not done thinking about the “earth-space environmental system” – we’ve got a couple other episodes you might consider checking out. Recently Justine, you reported an episode we called “Who Owns the Sky.”
Justine Paradis: Yup! It’s about how property rights work in the sky and even in outer space.
Nate Hegyi: To learn more about geoengineering, you can check out an episode from a while back called “Plan B.” And finally – if you want to learn more about the element of aluminum, which has all kinds of cool properties – you can check out our recent episode “The Element of Surprise.”
Justine Paradis: We’ll link to all three of those episodes in the show notes – along with lots of resources from this episode about dark skies, and satellites, and space.
Nate Hegyi: This episode was reported, produced, and mixed by Justine Paradis. It was edited by Taylor Quimby and me, Nate Hegyi.
Justine Paradis: Special thanks to Edward Oughton for talking to me about the emissions involved in low earth orbit satellite internet. Music in this episode came from Future Joust, Harbours & Oceans, Spiegelstadt, Curved Mirror, Silver Maple, Victor Lundberg, Wave Saver, Cobby Costa, From Now On, and Lofive. The blue whale calls were recorded by NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory.
Nate Hegyi: The satellites in our mega constellation also include Felix Poon and Catherine Hurley. Our Director of Podcasts is Rebecca Lavoie. Outside/In is a production of NHPR.