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Be wary of Elon Musk despoiling the ‘vault of heaven’

Martin Rees 4 hrs ago

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© Provided by The Guardian Photograph: Mike Blake/Reuters

Changing economics and advancing miniaturisation now enable

flotillas of small satellites to be launched into space – up to a hundred
on a single rocket. These microsatellites are already being deployed,
by companies such as Planet Lab in California, to survey every point on
the Earth every day, with sharp enough images to study building sites,
road traffic, land use and so forth.

But a bigger leap is now in the offing. Elon Musk’s company SpaceX
envisages the “Starlink” project. This entails launching up to 40,000
spacecraft into orbit in order to create a network that will enhance
global broadband communication. Other companies, such as Amazon,
say they have similar plans.

In principle, these are exciting and welcome developments, especially

if they bring broadband internet to the whole of Africa and other parts
of the developing world. But there is a downside. Starlink would
involve launching more objects into space, in this single constellation,
than all the satellites launched in the 60 years since the birth of the
space age. There would be roughly one in every square degree over
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the sky (the area on the sky covered by a small coin held at arm’s
length).

Related: Elon Musk unveils Starship designed to take crew on round-

trips to Mars

Skywatchers could find that their familiar starry sky was augmented by
huge numbers of bright spots moving across it, especially soon after
sunset and just before sunrise (the periods in the day when the sun is
below our horizon but shining on to satellites hundreds of kilometres
above us.) For professional astronomers looking steadily at a single
celestial body, these rogue lights would only be a minor irritant.
However, they would cause more confusion to projects that monitor
or search large areas of sky to seek transient objects – exploding stars
or even more exotic cosmic explosions. Especially confusing will be the
cases when part of the satellite acts like a mirror, creating a specially
bright and brief flash when it’s oriented so that it reflects the sun.

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© Photograph: Mike Blake/Reuters SElon Musk wants to create a space network that will enhance global
broadband communication.

One particularly important project that could be impeded by these

swarms of satellites is the search for asteroids. There are 2m asteroids,
which are more than 50 metres across, whose orbits cross that of the
Earth. Any of these could potentially hit Earth and would be big
enough for its impact to destroy a large city. Even though most of the
giant (dinosaur-killing) asteroids more than 1km across have been
discovered, only 2% of these still dangerous smaller ones are known
and there’s a strong motive to search for all the others, so that those
with trajectories that could bring them dangerously close to our world
can be deflected well in advance. In such searches, the “foreground” of
unpredictably moving satellites would be a complication.

There are also concerns among astronomers making measurements in

the
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protoplanets and such like, as well as their constituent gases and
molecules. Such observations will be impeded if Starlink satellites’
uplinks or downlinks “pollute” observationally interesting wavebands.

Radio telescopes are constructed in “radio quiet” places to minimise

artificial background, but there would be no hiding from the beams
sent from these satellites.

In mitigation, this particular enterprise is motivated by a goal that we

should acclaim: spreading the genuine benefit of broadband
worldwide, especially to the developing world. And it’s a plus that the
mega companies involved are genuinely aware of the downsides and
will be doing all they can to minimise it by blackening the surfaces and
choosing wavelengths carefully. These ventures are not as
irresponsible as earlier (and fortunately quashed) proposals to build
large advertising hoardings in space.

But we shouldn’t forget that it’s not just astronomers – a minority –

who care about this issue. The night sky, the “vault of heaven”, is the
one feature of our environment that has been shared, and wondered
at, by all humanity through the ages. We should deplore anything that
needlessly degrades its beauty and serenity, just as, more parochially,
we don’t want tinsel or phone masts in our national parks.

• Martin Rees is the astronomer royal. His latest book is On the Future:
Prospects for Humanity

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