Astronomers back call for review of bonkers rule that means satellite swarms fly without environment checks Astronomy researchers from several US universities have joined a campaign coordinated by US Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG) to pause low Earth satellite launches and convince the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to reconsider exempting swarms of small satellites from environmental review requirements. …
When the rule was made and you could practically count the number of satellites on your fingers because they were incredibly expensive both to build and launch then it probably made sense.
When somebody is tossing very cheap satellites in orbit by the tens of thousands with a lifetime only marginally longer than a politicians memory for inconvenient facts then that might need reviewing.
> Plank time (that being the ability of a politician to retain anything they don't want to know)
The Planck Time is how long politicians retain unfortunate truths.
The Plank Time is what we dream of applying to said politicians (one piece of wood, so many uses: dunking, nailing, swatting...)
I thought the shortest possible unit of time was the New York second, i.e. the time between the traffic light turning green and the yellow cab behind you honking his horn.
Doffs (grey Tilley today) hat to the late, great Terry Pratchett. I'd better be going. The coat with "Lords and Ladies" in the pocket please
"When the rule was made and you could practically count the number of satellites on your fingers because they were incredibly expensive both to build and launch then it probably made sense."
Mainly it's the cost of the payload that's expensive. In comparison, launching isn't that much.
There are all sorts of controls over what is allowed to happen and not happen in Antarctica, because of its environmental sensitivity. I don't understand why space isn't similarly controlled. You just couldn't imagine a commercial organisation saying "we've come up with a way to do something and it involves putting a load of kit into Antarctica", in the same way that SpaceX decided they wanted to get into the satellite broadband biz and started lofting thousands of satellites.
First define 'winning'. If it means filling LEO with so much junk that nobody else can safely launch satellites or other spacecraft, then yes, its winnable but ultimately everybody looses.
The problem is that Musk, as usual, doesn't seem to care what damage his schemes do to others, and his chums (Bezos, etc) haven't even considered that adding another few tens of thousands of satellites to LEO space might just possibly cause collisions and so add so much junk to the LEO scrap heap that space becomes effectively inacessable.
Really, its about time that those needing high speed terrestrial comms realise that fibre is the best option, and that bulk data transfers should use fibre, if message transfer speed is the prime requirement, or geostationary satellite links where data volume rather than message flight time is the main issue, and that LEO space needs to be reserved for manned earth-orbital traffic and the arrival and departure of lunar and interplanetary space flights.
The point that seems to have been forgotten by those wanting to stuff LEO and NEO space with tens of thousands of (short life) satellites is that once they start to collide more often than they do at present, then spaceflight of almost every type will soon become almost impossible for rather a long time.
"Really, its about time that those needing high speed terrestrial comms realise that fibre is the best option, and that bulk data transfers should use fibre...".
I do wonder if the math of these LEO clusters actually make sense. No matter how you slice it designing, testing, building, and launching rockets is an expensive business and yes, does give everyone on the face of the Earth theoretical access to a high speed Internet connection. But what if the same money had been spent laying fiber everywhere, especially if we consider the lifespan of a fiber cable around 40 years which with a 5 year life for LEO space junk means 7 full replacement cycles. I'd also guess you could be providing the resulting Internet access for less than £75/month...
The consumer business is a way to generate a bit of cashflow, the real money here is going to be in arbitrage. Over oceanic distances (Atlantic or Pacific) the team that transmits data at the speed of light in a vacuum wins big over the team who is tied to the speed of light in fiber.
You assume their users are also up in orbit? Because the really slow part is the up/downlink, that's why satellite Internet has so much lag (AFAIK). The space-to-space part of the trip might be marginally quicker, but the client-to-uplink-to-satellite and the satellite-to-downlink-to-client parts are definitely slower. Until some technological revolution takes place (laser uplinks or such), terrestrial fiber will be way quicker (and in both cases more reliable, which for some industries is as vital as raw speed).
Didn't downvote you though.
The space-to-space part of the trip might be marginally quicker
For very large values of "marginally". Much quicker — so much so that Starlink will eventually be able to provide lower latency between major financial markets than transoceanic fiber can. Mark Handley did some research on this a while back. It was widely publicized; see for example this article.
While this remains to be proven in practice, with the full constellation and satellite-to-satellite links, traders using Starlink should have a latency advantage for e.g. London-to-New-York quotes.
Starlink may yet make Musk significantly wealthier, if he doesn't melt down completely first. And even the possibility of that kind of wealth means the vested interest in Starlink is huge. There's a reason why billionaires are fighting over LEO-satellite Internet.
>> Because the really slow part is the up/downlink
Actually no. While it is true that the latency to a geo-stationary orbit is high "Satellite technologies inherently experience longer latencies since packets must travel approximately 44,500 miles from an earth station to the satellite and back. Therefore, the median latencies of satellite-based broadband services are much higher, at 594 ms to 624 ms" [1]. The latency to/from LEO is specified (by Starlink) in the "25-60 ms" [2] range and reported/measured in the "31ms to 94ms" range in 2020 [3] and is currently running at a 32.41ms global average per the independent Starlink Status [4].
For the Starlink satellite connections these measured latencies include both the transmission to orbit and the return plus the terrestrial connection from the downlink station to the target and they are on standard service connections.
And I'm not stating that any LEO constellation can do this today because it requires satellite to satellite (laser) comms and routing in space which are not universally deployed (but are likely a part of the proposed Starshield constellation and next generation Starlink).
Getting out the calculator... The flight distance between the nearest airports New-York (LGA) and London (LHR) is 3,457.54 mi (5,564.38 km) [5] and the refractive index of glass is approximately 1.5 leading to a speed of light in glass of approximately 2x10^8 m/s vs. speed in a vacuum of 3x10^8 (1/3 slower in glass) [6]. The orbital altitude of the Starlink LEO constellation is " at altitudes of 525, 530, and 535 km" [7] so we'll add in an additional 2x535km for the up/down link.
Minimum (one way) transmission time over fiber is: 5,564.38 km / 200,000 km/s = 0.028s = 28ms
Minimum (one way) transmission time over LEO is: 6,634.38 km / 300,000 km/s = 0.022s = 22ms
So while it's not possible today because the technology deployed does not support it there is a 6ms theoretical margin for the LEO solution on a London to New York connection. Neither fiber nor satellite delivers on these theoretical transmission times today but the opportunity is there.
[1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-355405A1.pdf?cl_system=mapi&cl_system_id=&clreqid=&kbid=122820
[2] https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1400-28829-70
[3] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/08/spacex-starlink-beta-tests-show-speeds-up-to-60mbps-latency-as-low-as-31ms/
[4] https://starlinkstatus.space/
[5] https://www.distance.to/New-York/London
[6] https://www.quora.com/What-is-precisely-the-speed-of-light-in-fiber-optics
[7] https://stlksat.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FCC-22-91A1.pdf
"But what if the same money had been spent laying fiber everywhere, especially if we consider the lifespan of a fiber cable around 40 years"
Yeah, this won't work in Outback Australia. You lay a fibre to some outback cattle station and you will NEVER recoup the costs to lay it. It costs $10,000 to have an NBN fibre laid up a single street. Extend that to a thousand or so Kilometres, and Starlink starts looking INCREDIBLY cheap!
On the other hand sending up 50000 satellites just to service a dozen settlements in the Australian outback might be overkill. IMHO at least.
Don't know the local situation, never been in Australia, but don't those settlements get power and telephone somehow? It hasn't to be fiber, after all those settlements will have average requirements (WWW, email, some streaming) so more traditional transports might be enough.
"But what if the same money had been spent laying fiber everywhere, especially if we consider the lifespan of a fiber cable around 40 years which with a 5 year life for LEO space junk means 7 full replacement cycles."
I wonder if anyone anywhere has pulled an "old" fibre out when laying a replacement? There's no money in recycling 40 year old expired fibre, unlike copper. Or is that going to be the next "green" target. Forcing telecos to extract old and redundant fibre as a "pollutant" :-)
Likewise, when undersea cables with various coatings, sheaths and armour for various stretches and depths of route become end-of-life, will anyone pull them up or will they just get left there, out of sight, out of mind?
Totally agree with the fiber thing, it scales a lot better and we don’t need Musk’s planetary shield.
The problem with fiber is someone has to put it in the ground or hang it on a pole.
To do this, the US government and the states have spent billions on “rural broadband “ but it is having limited deployment.
The problem is “underserved” is defined as not having connectivity instead of not having fiber.
Citizens vote for it, it’s approved and then the bureaucracy kicks in and labels their area served even tho they can get 10m down and 1m up from the local wireless provider.
Oh, the shield comment - when satellites start banging into each other, the garbage will shield the rest of the universe from us pesky humans.
Is there any evidence that the remnants of burned up sats actually cause damage to the ozone layer[1]? More so, say, than the approx. 40,000 tons of "natural" asteroidal/meteoric debris that enters Earths atmosphere ever year? The metallic ones have mostly iron, but also other metals in them. The carbonaceous stuff has all that evil "Carbon"[2] in them too.
[1] Or even good hypotheses that they might cause damage to the ozone layer.
[2] note, SCARE QUOTES!11!!!ONE!!11!
Astronomers definitely have a valid point but I would like them to make that point with honest numbers. Fuel load of a Falcon 9 is 123570kg. There will be about 100 Starlink launches this year. I used 14L/100km for the fuel efficiency of a dump truck. That number is old but for a smallish truck I can drive because I am the right age to have C1 on my ordinary license. Plenty of other numbers you could choose but astronomers are often content with an accuracy of multiply or divide 10. That puts the fuel required for an old small dump truck to drive around the world at about 5000kg. It would only take about 2500 trucks to match all the Starlink launches, not 7,000,000. While we are at it, driving around the world in a year is an average speed of 1.44km/h. A more honest picture would be 83 trucks each driving around the world thirty times per year (44km/h).
Do *your* "honest numbers" take into account the effects of *where* the pollutants are? How much of your ground-based emissions reach high altitude and how much of a difference does that make?
Your numbers may be more honest, or they may not, but not even mentioning such differences, not even to simply dismiss them as (in your mind) unimportant, leaves a hole in your argument big enough to fly a SpaceX constellation through.
Remember, fluorocarbons were all fine and dandy down here, but made a right mess up there.
I tried finding out what difference altitude makes to pollution. There are plenty of unsupported assertions on the internet but I found very little scientific evidence. The key take-aways are that rockets are a drop in the ocean compared to aviation and that aviation is small compared to surface level transport. The most recent research I found is from 2010. The most important statement from there is - at the time - more research would be needed to find out if releasing in the stratosphere (stratified, low mixing) is worse or better than the troposphere (plenty of mixing all the way to the ground so altitude in that layer is irrelevant). Nitrogen oxides from aircraft exhaust enhanced the ozone layer. The some pollutants reduced global warm while others increased it. The net effect was expected to increase global warming but that was not certain at the time. If someone has a link to more modern research I would be very interested.
Remember the 7,000,000 dump trucks are exclusively for pollution related to launch, not re-entry. The last scientific evidence I came across for re-entry was from this year: probably a problem that will grow in scale to match what Earth already receives from meteors. More research needed. The current Starlink license requires the satellites be designed to burn up completely in the atmosphere. Perhaps research will show it would be better for most of each satellite to splash into point Nemo. Very long term economics could favour recycling over replacing satellites.
"The key take-aways are that rockets are a drop in the ocean compared to aviation and that aviation is small compared to surface level transport. "
There's lots of things that can be done to reduce pollution from ground transport. A few are even being done.
The one big advantage of space-fi in LEO is the much better ping times when playing Fortnight over using a satellite that's in GEO. What will people do if they can't play first person shooter games once they've climbed to the summit of Ben Nevis or Mt Whitney? Think of all the kiddies undergoing massive anxiety when they can't use text on a nature hike with school.
"Perhaps research will show it would be better for most of each satellite to splash into point Nemo. "
Many of the first Starlink sats to be launched are dead at this point. They are coming down when they come down and there won't be any aiming.
The odds of a dead satellite hitting a person or property if it didn't burn up used to be microscopic. With just one company planning on lofting a mega-constalltion with a build out of 42,000 satellites and then needing to replace them every five years is really going to raise the odds of debris hitting things we'd rather it didn't land on. Now add Kuiper, One Web and whatever China and Russia are going to do along the same lines. Space-bourne comms can be very handy, but they are also highly vulnerable. Not from human attacks, but GCR's and our own sun getting feisty. It's much easier to damage/destroy a ground station to black out a region. The LEO satellites are only as good as the ground station they can link with.
Starlinks have bad aim because they are designed to burn up completely. If the strategy changes to point Nemo then the design will change so satellites that still work at their end of life can get there. With such a large number of satellites some of them will break before their scheduled end of life. The good news is rides to the same orbital plane are cheap because you can ride share with a mega constellation launch. A constellation designed for point Nemo would probably require the use of a deorbit/repair vehicle as a part of the launch or spectrum license.
That leaves a failed stage 2 dropping off a batch of satellites so low that they de-orbit before there is a chance to send a vehicle to de-orbit the broken ones. At that point we need statistics we do not have: Does the number of brand new satellites put in the wrong orbit and so broken they cannot get to point Nemo constitute a significant risk to the public? The only clue we have is that when there was no evidence about the environmental effects of burn up SpaceX chose that over point Nemo.
I don't think focussing on the fuel used is helpful. If necessary, this can be dealt with through some kind of carbon-pricing, though only if all launchers agree.
What isn't in doubt, is the problem of having many tens of thousands of satellites in orbit. This causes problems in and of itself, but also, of course, when they come to end of life. We don't know the long term consequences of letting them all burn up in reentry and, if our experience of terrestial pollution has shown us anything, it's that we shouldn't wait until we have a problem before we start dealing with it.
A liability and insurance based scheme that makes companies liable for the debris would be helpful, but this probably needs accompanying by some kind of fund to stop companies declaring bankruptcy as soon as they become liable.
However, given the history of US environmental regulation, the power of commercial lobbies and the recent SCOTUS decision on the ability of government agencies to regulate, I wouldn't expect anything to happen soon; probably not until there are civil claims that force changes.
Check the bit I am complaining about:
US PIRG expects tons of satellite debris will be burned daily upon re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. That's in addition to the pollution caused by satellite launches, which US PIRG projects will be "equivalent to seven million diesel dump trucks circling the globe each year."
I agree satellite debris re-entering the Earth's atmosphere is an issue but according to the quote the 7,000,000 dump trucks are for pollution separate from that. I am doubling down about my complaint and adding some diesel soot.
There will be other satellites consellations in the US, China is going to be doing the same, and maybe the EU will feel left out and decide to join in the fun.
There needs to be international standards for the amount and type of reflectivity allowed, and maybe some limits on the total number of satellites. Before long astronomical photos will look like those pictures you take if you point a wide angle camera straight up for the entire night, where the stars are all long smeared circular tracks.
Even if the FCC "fixed" the problem in the US, those rules won't apply to China. There are also issues with disposal, Starlink satellites are designed to last five years and ones in even lower orbits will have an even shorter life due to increased drag. A decade from now we'll have dozens of satellites entering the earth's atmosphere PER DAY, where they may have debris falling to ground but will definitely have currently unknown effect on the upper atmosphere. If we're lucky the side effect will counter global warming. If we're unlucky it'll make it worse, harm the ozone layer, or something else bad.
Here's my cynical take:
The astronomers haven't a chance. 1) It's already too late, 2) the money behind companies like Starlink is too big to compete against with a petition to the FCC, and 3) as has been pointed out here, the FCC has no jurisdiction over European and Asian companies who are working on their own LEO comsat constellations.
My more cynical take:
Earth-based astronomy is walking dead. Get used to it. Funding more and bigger terrestrial telescopes is a waste of money. Put your instruments in orbit, or better still, on Lunar Farside, where they'll be shielded from terrestrial light and RF pollution.
My really cynical take: the problem of too many comsats in LEO will solve itself. Once there are 15,000+ birds in orbit under control of multiple companies/countries, it's only a matter of time before a cascading collision destroys most of them. Remember the old nuclear chain-reaction demo with mousetraps and ping-pong balls? Yeah, like that.
While I agree with your first paragraph, I definitely disagree with your second: Terrestrial telescopes are not, I repeat, NOT comparable and replaceable with space instruments. For some very simple technical and financial reasons: A telescope isn't just some system with mirrors/lenses which allows you to "watch stars" when you feel like it, it's a highly specialized system which observes the sky in one of a multitude of wavelengths, collecting very different information, both in nature and time frame. For instance, some observation need to be done 24/7 over a very long period (years), which would be totally impossible with a $500 million space-based instrument. Fortunately here on Earth that kind of observation can be done with older, now uninteresting and thus available telescopes.
What I'm saying is that all telescopes are not the same, we need many dozen very different ones, from optical ones (narrow field or wide angle), to (various wavelengths) radio telescopes. Horses for courses.
Also, there are thousands of research projects competing for telescope time all over the world, fortunately they don't all need the exact same instruments at the same time, something which would happen if there was only a couple extremely expensive, space-based ones.
In short, we simply can't abandon all terrestrial instruments, it is technically impossible. Hubble and the James Webb are prestige projects, used for very specific research, but they haven't replaced any of the existing terrestrial ones. They are not better, they are different.
(Upvoted nevertheless)
There are already tons of metal hitting the upper atmosphere daily. No appreciable deleterious effect can be seen.
This green FUD bullshit on the scale of the radiation scam that killed nuclear energy. Coal ash is 100 timjes more radioactive than nuclear energy per unit of energy produced and one does NOT see any stripes of radioactive death downwind of coal plants.
"one does NOT see any stripes of radioactive death downwind of coal plants."
One does see plenty of health issues in people downwind of coal burning power plants. Those illnesses could very well be from low level radiation being breathed in or ingested with food, but mostly will be from other pollutants the plant put out. 5-10 years down the road, it's awfully hard to pinpoint where a cancer got it's start. BTW, I'm not disagreeing that coal ash piles are far more radioactive than the area surrounding a nuclear power plant.
The fear surrounding using nuclear materials for power generation is principally through a lack of education and disinformation. That's easy to spot when people point to somebody stealing material from a nuclear plant and making a bomb or the worry that one day the plant will be no more than a huge mushroom cloud. Even the Russian knew that the design of the Chernobyl reactors was twitchy as hell, but they'd already sunk the money and they seemed to be working ok.............. Fukushima was a CF in terms of site planning. Who was the drug addict that thought it was no big deal to put backup batteries and generators below grade someplace with a significant tsunami risk? There seemed to be a bunch of other contributing things to that site I won't list but are mainly due to stoopid hoomans.
"Fukushima had considerable defences against tsunami's"
With batteries and generators in the basement next to the ocean, I'm not seeing those defenses. Even if those were at the top of a hill and the water went that high, chances would be good that they'd still work. Being sat in a pool of salt water was a problem.
... at least some of the satellites put up were for the benefit of humanity; weather prediction and all that.
Who decided it was a good idea to allow zillionaires to do so as a means to make profits, manifestly without considering the downsides to everyone else?
Mine's the one with a bit of disgust in the pocket.
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