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In news that we have heard before, but no one seems to want to do anything about, the thousands of satellites being launched into space by SpaceX and other companies are causing a big problem. And if something isn’t done about it, people will start to become at risk, pollution of the atmosphere will become untenable, astronomers’ views of space will become obscured, and our ability to explore the galaxy in the future may become limited.
Currently, one to two of SpaceX’s 8,000 Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth every single day. That number could soon reach as much as five times per day when adding in the satellites being launched by Amazon’s Project Kuiper and other companies. By that time, adding in the satellites being launched into space by China, there could be as many as 50,000 of them circling the planet. In 2020, SpaceX said it had plans to launch 42,000 satellites. By 2030, the European Space Agency predicts there will be at least 100,000 low-orbit satellites flying around Earth.
According to Harvard–Smithsonian astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, these satellites only have a lifespan of 5 to 7 years. They are also, at least according to the companies that launch them like SpaceX, designed to completely burn up once they fall back into Earth’s atmosphere.
“Now we’re not sure we really believe that they really burn up, but at least for the most part they melt,” McDowell told EarthSky.org.
As Avi Loeb, director of Harvard’s Institute for Theory and Computation, explained to NewsNation, “They are small enough for most of them to burn up and not reach the ground.” However, the Federal Aviation Administration has estimated that within a decade, the likelihood that a fragment of space debris will hit and kill someone could rise by 61% each year. When that happens, Loeb said, “Lawyers will start to get involved.”
Throw in the fact that research conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that found the metal and rare metal particles that end up in the stratosphere when these satellites de-orbit may end up starting chemical reactions that could destroy the ozone layer.
“Almost no one is thinking about the environmental impact on the stratosphere,” atmospheric chemist Daniel Murphy told Science magazine in 2024.
There is also the risk of the Kessler syndrome, or Kessler effect, which as NASA scientists Donald Kessler and Burton Cour-Palais explained way back in 1978, “As the number of artificial satellites in Earth orbit increases, the probability of collisions between satellites also increases. Satellite collisions would produce orbiting fragments, each of which would increase the probability of further collisions, leading to the growth of a belt of debris around the Earth.”
Earlier this year, the European Space Agency warned “the extrapolation of the current changing use of orbits and launch traffic, combined with continued fragmentations and limited post mission disposal success rate could lead to a cascade of collision events over the next centuries.”
That warning came after the the European Space Agency reported back in 2019 that there were over 750,000 pieces of space debris orbiting Earth. That number has gone up considerably since then.
“We could have a major space junk event that will mean that we can’t launch beyond low-Earth orbit and we trap ourselves on Earth,” Ralph Dinsley, founder and executive director of Northern Space and Security LTD said. “The simplest event is that it will slow down how we do space exploration. It has been ten years since the last satellite on satellite collision. The likelihood of it happening is very low but there is still that potential. But the catastrophic results could be huge.”