The Wonder of the Night Sky

"I think of it as being like, if you just suddenly said, 'Hey ... in order to make a profit, I'm going to just destroy all flowers and make them so that people can't see flowers anymore'."
"You could say, 'Well, OK, maybe we didn't really need the flowers', but there's a certain quality of life that you're losing from that."
Sharon Morsink, physics professor, University of Alberta observatory

"The prospects for radioastronomy are arguably even worse than for the optical side."
"The footprint of these satellites is going to be much, much bigger than ground-based transmitter making it much harder to establish preserves."
"They are going to be blinding the radio telescopes, possibly quite literally if the signals are going to be strong enough to damage the receivers that we're working with."
"[An occultation] might be a real dip because the star might be doing something strange, or it might be one of these [darkened] satellites, how are we going to tell? We can't."
David Clements, astronomer, Imperial College London 

The Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia.

REUTERS/Stefica Nicol Bikes

"I think the point to be made here is it's a national process rather than an international one. Even though the impacts are global."
"[Elon] Musk is the great disrupter. Just like he disrupted global transportation with electric cars, he's now disrupting global communications with Starlink and that could be a very good thing."
"He's forcing established institutions to get moving, to grapple with the new world he's creating."
Michael Byers, professor of international politics, University of British Columbia

For every conundrum of a problem that rises to trouble the world there are always several perspectives. And billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has seemingly impulsively created more than one person's share of presenting the world community with a level of consternation revolving around the vast topical issues he involves himself with; credibly as it happens, but with their irritating baggage, nonetheless.

A boy watches the Milky Way in the sky over the Tatacoa Desert, in Colombia, on October 11, 2018.

Luis Acosta/AFP via Getty Images

His ambitious plan to plant a network of satellites across the sky in the creation of the "world's most advanced broadband internet system", to help connect remote communities, among other things, such as the Arctic, has moved from the drawing board to action. His company SpaceX, last week launched its fourth grouping of satellites into orbit. Over two thousand satellites currently spin about the Earth, many of them visible to the naked eye. Steadily moving across the sky as a blip of light no one could mistake for a star or a plane; too low for the former and too high for the latter.

The blueprint he has envisaged and has placed into motion is adding another 12,000 satellites within the next several years in the creation of a satellite-constellation he has named Starlink. And nor is  his the only enterprise contemplating adding communications equipment to the night sky. And there's the rub; the night sky as we know it -- already compromised by the glow of the world's metropoli, is set to become ever brighter, a light-glare that will make it beyond difficult for astronomers to view the planets, the stars, the constellations and the universe at large through even the most powerful of telescopes.

An astronomer in the Netherlands captured a Starlink train zooming across the sky shortly after its launch.

Vimeo/SatTrackCam Leiden

SpaceX appears well aware of concerns emanating from the scientific community related to Starlink's potential to occlude the night sky. Testing has begun on the potential for a dark coating on satellites to make them less visibly reflective. Which hasn't sufficiently persuaded some astronomers who are reported to be considering legal action to put a halt to the encroaching luminosity of the night sky. SpaceX's work is costly in the technical production of the satellites, the propulsion systems to whip them into space, and with legal licensing hurdles to leap.

But in fact, any ambitious company with the cash flow that SpaceX has, contemplating their own additions to the viral communications industry from space can register with the International Telecommunications Union for an assigned space slot in high orbit. SpaceX's plan calls for its satellites to launch into low orbit, with no slots assigned, giving free rein to populate the night sky with reflective light.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket heads into the clouds after successfully being launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station carrying 60 Starlink satellites, on November 11, 2019.

SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

There are of course, regulatory bodies such as the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, and the Inter-Agency Space Debris Co-ordination Committee, both of which have issued international guidelines relating to the exploration and use of space for the benefit of humanity. How, however, to address the issue of how many satellites can be lifted into the sky, and how satellite traffic can be regulated, and how to deal with light pollution, remains.

OneWeb, a global communications company, is considering a constellation of satellites of its own and has initiated its first satellite launch a year ago, preparing now to launch a following batch of 34 satellites from Kazakhstan. Amazon too, is prepared to enter the game with its own network of satellites. Commercializing space to a degree not envisioned heretofore.

Currently, points out Professor Morsink, astronomers are searching out objects near Earth, like "asteroids, which could smash into the Earth and cause mass extinctions sort of like what happened to the dinosaurs". The presence of thousands of satellites illuminating and crowding their field of vision makes it impossible to track the presence of new or moving objects....

"It becomes like every other sector, a race to quantity. Bigger, better, cheaper."
"[The sheer number of Starlink satellites planned -- 42,000 -- is what makes this a pressing threat]: If we were talking about one or two satellites I wouldn't be worrying too much."
"Who's stopping other people saying well if it's just about the money I'm going to put Coca-Cola streaming across the sky and that's it, and we've lost capability. Then that means that astronomy, to progress, needs to launch satellites and we can't do anything from the ground, and that's going to be a big slow-down in terms of science."
"Unfortunately, popular culture sees astronomy as a hobby rather than a science and they forget an enormous portion of physics that we know now is thanks to astronomy. Which, at the end of the day, is the biggest lab we have at our disposal." 
Giorgio Savini, director, University College London Observatory