SpaceX Wants a Million Satellites. We Have 4,548 Stars.
September is just around the corner, and with it the dark nights return. And that's how it's always been. I find the autumn season rather cosy, as long as the summer has been something to write home about too.
But on Monday it dawned on me that the night sky is no longer something we can take for granted.
The moon hung big and orange in the sky, and often, when it looks bigger than usual, I end up standing on my balcony, staring at it. Making out faint lines of what I think are mountains and craters. For me, looking at the moon is a kind of mindfulness; making me realise that the email you still haven't replied to doesn't really mean much, next to the giant ball of rock circling us into eternity.
Without quite knowing why, I tipped my head back and looked further up. In a straight line I saw 8–9 dots racing across the sky. Drones, I thought at first. But the drones were moving at an enormous speed, and within 45 seconds they were gone. Starlink, was my second thought.
It's become fairly common to see the many satellites Elon Musk and SpaceX fire off into space. Starlink delivers internet by satellite to remote and sparsely populated areas. The Musk company has also become a central player in Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine. In February, Musk decided to block Russian forces from using Starlink.
Last Saturday, a Falcon 9 rocket was launched from California. On board were 27 Starlink satellites headed for orbit around Earth. Those were the ones I saw on Monday night. The satellites are easy to recognise – a train of lights, one after another.
What's happening to the starry sky?
The little dots tearing across the night sky got me wondering. Is this what the sky is going to look like in the future?
In 2025, Starlink passed 10,000 satellites in orbit around Earth, and the Musk company now holds roughly two-thirds of every satellite orbiting the planet.
Muskan Singh
It's happened fast. Only six years ago, in 2019, there were fewer than 2,000 active satellites in orbit. According to figures from Orbital Radar, there are now over 18,000 satellites. In other words, a ninefold increase.
In January 2022, The Astronomical Journal published a scientific paper on how satellites in orbit would affect light conditions and light pollution. It concludes that 65,000 satellites would mean that every fifteenth star you see in the sky is, in reality, a satellite.
Samantha M. Lawler
The number 65,000 isn't random. It's the number we end up with in the sky once you count the planned ventures from Starlink, Amazon's Leo, China's Guowang and Britain's OneWeb. When the paper was published, this looked like a worst-case scenario. But where things stand today is that SpaceX launches an average of 24 satellites a week. And the space company has plans to scale up.
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SpaceX wants a million satellites
In January, SpaceX applied for permission to launch a million satellites into low Earth orbit (LEO) around Earth. That would have enormous consequences for what our sky looks like. But how many stars can we actually see today? Luckily, someone has done the counting for us!
9,096 stars are visible in the sky at any given time. But since we're only ever on one side of the Earth at a time, the real number is 4,548. If SpaceX gets its way with a million satellites, the sky will consist of considerably more satellites than stars.
There isn't much we know about this million-satellite plan. How is SpaceX going to prevent collisions? How will it affect atmospheric pollution? And not least, how are data centres – which is what they'll be sending into orbit – supposed to operate in a vacuum?
Brighter than the moon
Reflect Orbital is another company with big plans to cover up the starry sky. They want to launch satellites that work as mirrors and can supply sunlight at night. The reflected sunlight will light up an area of roughly five kilometres. According to the European Southern Observatory, based in Chile, the light from these satellites will be four times brighter than the moon.
Reflect Orbital is in the prototype phase now, and is aiming for 50,000 satellites by 2030. The goal is to be able to deliver solar energy to Earth anywhere, any time. But if that becomes reality, the night sky won't be the only thing that disappears: how will wildlife and insects react when the ground and the area around them is lit up at a time when it's meant to be dark?
Astronomy generates huge value for humankind, including scientific, technical, economical, and educational, and helps us understand our place in the Universe. The large number of planned satellites in low-Earth orbit challenges that capacity, underscoring the need to limit future satellite launches and for astronomers, engineers, satellite operators and other stakeholders to work together to adopt strict mitigation measures. – ESO Director General Xavier Barcons.
Thankfully, there are people researching this, and sounding the alarm.
At the start of August, yet another research paper landed, exploring how data centres in space affect the night sky.
People have lost the sense of the night sky because of the light-polluted cities, and now we’re rewriting that story with artificial satellites, says Aaron Boley, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia, to Scientific American.
The lights I saw on Monday night were a curiosity, but within a few years the sky could be packed with satellites. Blue Origin, Cowboy Space Corporation, Reflect Orbital and SpaceX are all fighting for dominance in space. The prime real estate is up over our poles, where satellites can circle endlessly in permanent sunlight.
SpaceX turned out to be the reminder to sit myself down in the autumn dark and look up.
The stars are about to end up in the shadows.