A Sky Slowly Filling With Lights
Closer to home, the night sky is becoming infrastructure. That was the warning WIRED laid out in October 2021, as SpaceX’s Starlink broadband service, then serving about 100,000 households from some 1,800 orbiting satellites, prepared to leave beta testing. A decade earlier only a few thousand spacecraft circled Earth; Starlink engineers aimed to build up to 12,000 satellites, launching scores more on Falcon 9 rockets nearly every month, and a recent FCC report noted the company had applied for authorization for 30,000 beyond that. The fleet, dubbed a “mega-constellation,” dominated satellite internet, with Amazon and OneWeb planning thousands of their own.
For communities under those orbits, the concern was reflected sunlight. Astronomers, environmentalists and indigenous groups warned that Starlink could irrevocably brighten the night sky, and telescopes like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile faced image streaks no software could fully erase. Aaron Boley, who codirects the Outer Space Institute and teaches planetary astronomy at the University of British Columbia, described the experience directly: “If I walk on my porch and look up at night, I’ll see a bright satellite going across the sky, and usually I’ll see several. It’s a very weird sensation: All the stars then seem to move, like an optical illusion,” he said. “It’s going to have a much larger effect than people appreciate.”
The Numbers Behind the Glow
What it meant for people depended on latitude. In a paper then going through peer review, Boley and astronomer Samantha Lawler modeled a near future in which roughly 65,000 satellites from SpaceX, Amazon, OneWeb and China’s Starnet/GW circled within a couple of years. Near 50 degrees north and south, affecting Canada and Europe, satellites would account for 7 to 14 percent of telescope-visible lights, and roughly one in 10 of those the naked eye catches. Tradeoffs followed: satellites near 1,200 kilometers up linger longer in view, while Starlink’s spacecraft race by below 600 kilometers, glowing more brightly to observers on the ground and forcing SpaceX to fly more of them for equal coverage.
The industry response was mixed. SpaceX had tested a darkened satellite, Darksat, claiming a 55 percent brightness reduction that some astronomers could not confirm, then switched to visor-equipped Visorsat craft, with no public data on performance; an unpublished arXiv paper and Boley’s team independently found at least 70 percent of Visorsat spacecraft still brighter than the preferred threshold. An Amazon representative acknowledged the problem, and OneWeb’s Katie Dowd said her company was consulting the Royal Astronomical Society in the UK plus the American Astronomical Society while taking brightness measurements.
A Commons, and a Call for Rules
The American Astronomical Society convened its SatCon2 workshop that summer, deliberately including amateur astronomers, astrophotographers, environmentalists and indigenous communities from several countries. “Everybody wanted things to slow down. They want industry to engage more. This is something that belongs to everyone as a global commons,” said Aparna Venkatesan, the University of San Francisco astrophysicist who co-chaired the workshop’s public engagement arm. Policy options on the table included FAA or FCC rules and ending space’s exemption from the National Environmental Policy Act.
Space junk compounded the worry. Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation noted engineers can deorbit aging satellites, “But there’s still some uncertainty there. Actively deorbiting only works if the satellite’s still functional,” he said; if 2 percent of Starlink’s fleet failed early, that still meant hundreds of derelict craft. Boley’s closing image stuck with families who drive out of town for stars: “You can get out of the city, escape from city light pollution, and experience the night sky, but you can’t do that from satellite light pollution. There’s nowhere you would be able to go,” he said.
