More than 10,000 Starlink satellites currently orbit the Earth. We see them crawling across dark skies, no matter how remote our location, and streaking through images from research telescopes.
SpaceX recently announced that it wants to launch 1 million more of these satellites as orbital data centers for AI computing power.
A few years ago, we wrote a paper predicting what the night sky would look like with 65,000 satellites from four planned megaconstellations: SpaceX’s Starlink, Amazon’s Kuiper (now Leo), the U.K.’s OneWeb, and China’s Guowang. We calibrated our models to observations of real Starlink satellites and came up with a startling prediction: One in 15 visible points in the night sky would be a satellite, not a star.
A million satellites would be so much worse.
The human eye can see fewer than 4,500 stars in an unpolluted night sky. If we permit SpaceX to launch these satellites, we will see more satellites than stars — for large portions of the night and the year, throughout the world. This will severely damage the night sky for everyone on Earth.
SpaceX’s proposal also completely fails to account for atmospheric pollution, collision risk or how to develop the technology needed to disperse waste heat from orbital data centers.
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