Unchecked Megaconstellations

Satellite swarms could destroy our view of the heavens and seriously damage our planet

- BY PHIL PLAIT

I REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME I SAW A SATELLITE. I was a teenager, standing in my mildly light-polluted suburban yard and doing my usual stargazing. The satellite was a faint “star” moving slowly and smoothly across the sky, and as I watched it I felt a mix of awe and wonder that such a thing could be seen—and that humans could put an object into orbit at all.

That was a lifetime ago, and I now look back on that evening with more discomfiture than nostalgia; my adolescent naivete feels almost embarrassing.

That’s because these days, seeing one of those celestial travelers fills me with dread. We are firmly in the era of the satellite constellation—groups of dozens of similar satellites—and are currently entering the era of the megaconstellation, wherein groups of thousands of satellites swarm the skies. The clusters of satellites started small, but like a viral outbreak, they grew almost without us noticing—and now we’re dealing with a pandemic.

I wrote about this problem for Scientific American in May 2023. At the time, there were 7,500 active satellites orbiting Earth; about 4,000 of them were SpaceX Starlink satellites that provided Internet service. In the three years or so since then, the number of Starlink satellites in orbit has surpassed 10,000. Today there are more Starlink satellites up there than the sum total of all other operational satellites.

This ratio will almost certainly get more skewed toward Starlink, too; back in 2019, when the first Starlink satellites were launched, SpaceX filed proposals with the Federal Communications Commission for up to 30,000 additional satellites.

Does that sound bad? Well, there may come a day, all too soon, when we’re nostalgic for that small a number of satellites cluttering the sky. On January 30, 2026, SpaceX applied for permission to launch as many as one million more satellites.

Yes, one million.