SpaceX’s 1 million satellites could avoid environmental checks

Astronomers are scrambling to assess 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 filed an application with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to send a vast mega-constellation of a million satellites into space, which CEO Elon Musk said would serve as orbital data centers for artificial intelligence.

The number of satellites would far exceed any other satellite in orbit, with only 14,500 active satellites in space today. Currently, the FCC is not required to assess the potential environmental impact of launching such a large number of satellites, including the effects on Earth’s atmosphere or changes to the night sky that it would cause.

“We are deeply concerned,” says Ruskin Hartley, CEO of DarkSky International. “We are not opposed to satellites, but we believe it should be done responsibly.”

Following satellite applications, the FCC allows members of the public to comment, which it did for SpaceX’s proposal less than a week after its submission – extremely quick compared to 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 expressing concerns about the impacts on astronomy and Earth’s atmosphere. “A million satellites is absolutely terrifying,” says Samantha Lawler of the University of Regina in Canada.

SpaceX hasn’t revealed many details about the planned satellites, including their size or altitude. This left astronomers like Lawler unable to determine exactly what the impact of the constellation would be. “We are working to gather the information we need to write to the FCC,” she said.

In the worst case, tens of thousands of satellites would be visible to the naked eye all night, she said, and many more would obscure the view of telescopes on Earth and in space. The satellites would also need to be continually resupplied, potentially every five years, like SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, meaning that on average one satellite would launch and another re-enter the atmosphere every 3 minutes. Currently, only a handful of satellites re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere each day.

This could be extremely harmful to the planet’s atmosphere. When satellites and rockets burn, they produce aluminum oxide, or alumina, a substance that destroys the ozone layer. “We are talking about teragrams [1 trillion grams] alumina,” says Lawler. “This would cause massive depletion of the ozone layer and could potentially change the temperature of the stratosphere.”

The reason the FCC is currently not required to assess the environmental impact of any satellite application, even of this scale, is that its space activities are exempt from the National Environmental Policy Act in the United States. If a significant issue is raised during the comment process, it may trigger further review of an application, but it’s unclear whether that will happen, says Kevin Bell of the Free Information Group in Washington, DC.

“In an ideal world, [the FCC] they would study it,” Bell says, but “they don’t necessarily have the internal scientific capacity to judge atmospheric impacts.”

The FCC and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.