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A new report by a consumer advocacy group calls for a renewed push to review the environmental effects of low-Earth-orbit satellites like the ones operated by StarLink.
These are satellites that scoot around in orbit, somewhere between 300 and 1,200 miles from Earth’s surface. For most of humanity’s ventures into the outer realms of our planet, just a few hundred such satellites orbited overhead, most of them operated and overseen by government agencies like NASA. But in the past five years, the amount of satellites in the sky has increased almost 127 times over. And right now, there’s very little regulation governing how most of these satellites are launched, or what happens to the internal components when the satellites die, fall earthward, and burn up in the atmosphere.
Rocket launches and their payloads have not typically been subjected to comprehensive environmental review. That is because the launches have mainly been operated by noncommercial agencies like NASA and have been relatively infrequent. But as the space race expands to include more private companies, the number of launches are increasing, and the sky is filling up with privately operated craft.
The new report is called “WasteX—Environmental Harms of Satellite Internet Mega-Constellations.” It was released today by the public interest group PIRG, which among other things focuses on sustainability and making products and production processes more repairable and reusable. As you might be able to tell by the name, the big target of the report here is StarLink, the satellite internet service operated by SpaceX and helmed by billionaire Elon Musk that provides data connections for people in off-the-grid locations.
The author of the PIRG report is Lucas Rockett Gutterman (that’s his real middle name), the director of PIRG’s Designed to Last campaign, which focuses on repairability and reining in disposable devices. He says the goal of taking this stance is not to limit the availability of the internet across the world, but to bring attention to how that goal is being accomplished.
“Having an internet connection is good,” Gutterman says. “We want to connect people to the joy and the community and the economic opportunities of the internet, but we also don't want to create a mess that's going to take potentially hundreds of years for us to clean up if we do it wrong.”
About that mess: Since its launch in 2018, StarLink has put more than 6,000 satellites into low Earth orbit—they typically fly about 342 miles above the planet’s surface. The company is authorized to put up more than 40,000 total satellites, though it says it likely won't need to put that many in commission in order to reach its coverage goals. The Earth has never had to contend with a sky quite so full of machines.
“We should look before we leap and make sure the technologies that we're using to connect everyone to the internet are safe for the environment and sustainable,” Gutterman says. “It's as simple as that.”
Goodbye Blue Sky
Moriba Jah is a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and an environmental advocate who works on the website Wayfinder.Privateer, which tracks nearly every object currently circling the globe. Currently, he says, they’re tracking around 50,000 objects in space. Out of that 50,000, he says, around 40,000 are bits of garbage. The others are working satellites, but the scale of them is staggering.
“Out of that 10,000 working satellites, about 6,000 of those belong to Elon,” Jah says. “So Elon owns over half of all of humanity’s working satellites.”
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Musk isn’t the only one with otherworldly ambitions. Earlier this week, China launched the first of its planned 15,000-satellite constellation. Project Kuiper, a space initiative operated by Amazon, plans to launch a network of 3,000 satellites into low Earth orbit. OneWeb, a satellite internet company that has flirted with bankruptcy, still wants to get thousands of its satellites into orbit. Even Facebook has considered getting in on the satellite game. There’s a bonafide space race going on to try to conquer the satellite internet market; in a matter of years, it’s going to result in hundreds of thousands of satellites spinning above us.
The environmental implications of what it takes to build these networks are not yet clear. Low-Earth internet satellites—and StarLink in particular—have been controversial since the beginning. Astronomers have decried the light pollution caused by the endeavor that can affect research and might fundamentally change how we see the night sky. Pieces of space junk have rained down from the sky—something that is a rare occurrence, but only likely to increase as more objects get put up into orbit in the first place. Satellites that have to be decommissioned can be burned up by tipping them into the atmosphere, where the friction of reentry causes them to combust. But the vaporization of various metals and plastics in the upper atmosphere can affect life on the surface in unknown ways. Compounding this problem is the fact that very little is known about what materials these companies use and how those materials are sourced.
There have been few comprehensive studies about fuel emissions from launches and what happens when satellites vaporize upon reentry, though what has been found points to potentially severe effects to the ozone and the possibility of warming the stratosphere. Plus, there are the materials used and the fuel required to launch a satellite into the air in the first place. Pair all that with the fact that these satellites have a relatively short shelf life, and will need to be replaced often. StarLink satellites have a lifespan of roughly five years before the company says they will be decommissioned.
“I’ll applaud SpaceX for developing reusable rockets,” Jah says. “But we don’t have reusable satellites. What we launch is equivalent to a single-use plastic. Every single satellite has its destiny—to become garbage. That’s the destiny of everything we launch.”
Space Oddity
StarLink has 3 million subscribers. The company provides internet access to everyone from rural residents who might have trouble getting it elsewhere, to wealthy boaters out at sea on their yachts. The service has even been used for critical wartime communications in places like Ukraine. (Though a reliable connection has only been as consistent as Elon Musk is.)
As these human-made constellations grow across the sky, Gutterman says it is time to take a serious look at exactly what it takes to get them up there—and what happens when they come back down.
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The trouble is, the government regulations on this front don’t have much teeth. In the US, the Federal Aviation Administration approves the launch of commercial satellites like StarLink’s, but the Federal Communications Commission oversees the regulation of communications satellites like StarLink’s. But in determining whether companies can launch or not, the FCC has repeatedly determined that internet satellite companies are “categorically exempt” from environmental review. It’s this point that PIRG takes issue with, and they’re not the only ones.
A 2022 report by the US Government Accountability Office recommended changes to the FCC’s process of excluding satellite companies from environmental review, but the FCC has yet to publicly make those changes. The FCC did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
In its new report, PIRG calls on the FCC to do a couple of specific things. First, it asks the agency to remove the categorical exclusion that keeps low-orbit commercial internet satellites from having to undergo environmental review. And secondly, it encourages pausing the launches of any new commercial internet satellites before they’ve undergone said environmental review.
“The number of satellites definitely warrants a reexamination of whether your rules are still achieving what you want to achieve,” says Andrew Von Ah, the director of physical infrastructure issues at the GAO and also the director of the agency’s report. “You can’t let the companies you’re trying to regulate tell you that they shouldn’t be regulated. But there is always a balance, you do have to balance the regulation that you’re putting forward with being responsible to the economy and to the market as well.”
Asking the government to delay launches for protracted environmental review is likely to be controversial—and rile up the companies that want to blast off indiscriminately. But both Jah and Gutterman say they don’t want to stop the satellites from going into orbit, they just want us to know what this proliferation does to the planet.
“The reason I think we should slow down is because we don’t know if we should slow down,” Jah says. “I think there’s a lot of hubris in saying, look nothing bad has happened yet, so everything is OK. Every time we’ve done that, historically, it’s always led to detriment.”
Ultimately, Gutterman compares the current approach to these satellites to the proliferation of single use vape-cartridges or other disposable products that have permeated society.
“This technology falls in line with this greater cultural shift we have towards everything being disposable,” Gutterman says. “These companies should have to justify the scale of their mega constellations—weighing the public interest versus the environmental harms.”
