There could soon be thousands of them orbiting Earth. These bizarre lines of glowing dots recently spotted in the night sky are Starlink satellites. Here's why Elon Musk's latest project is so controversial.
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00:30Three, two, one, zero.
00:46Ignition.
00:49Liftoff.
00:52In 2025, there could be up to 12,000 Starlink satellites in orbit.
01:11And Starlink is not the only project at all.
01:14There are other projects from other companies that provide thousands of other satellites.
01:20In a few years, we could end up with 10, 20, 30 or 40,000 satellites
01:27dedicated to the Internet connection at the beginning all over the planet.
01:50There are a number of issues with Starlink, but the one that astronomers are most worried about is their brightness.
02:10These satellites are quite large satellites, and they're in a very low orbit.
02:15And that combines to make them unexpectedly bright as seen by people on the ground.
02:20And so this has a couple of implications.
02:23It has implications for professional astronomers, where a satellite passing across their camera during an exposure can actually damage the data.
02:32We have estimated that some projects that are under development, large telescopes under construction,
02:44will easily see 30 to 50% of their sky observation time reduced to nothing by the presence of these satellites,
02:52which will prevent them from using the observations made.
03:02That statement is very misleading.
03:15Yes, there are these thousands of satellites already up, but most of them are either small or in extremely high orbits.
03:23And so you can't see them because they're faint.
03:26SpaceX's satellites are big and low, and so they're much brighter than most of those 4,900 whatever that he was talking about.
03:36In fact, there were only 400 satellites, including Debris, that were big and low before they started launching Starlink.
03:44So they've launched 420, so they've already doubled the number of big and low satellites, and they're only just getting started.
03:56The first experiment that SpaceX did to try and make things better for us was they launched a thing called DarkSat.
04:19So one of the Starlink satellites was painted with a special coating on its side to make it less bright, and that helped a little.
04:28And they're also now planning to launch another test satellite called VisorSat, which will have a sort of sun shield around it to reduce reflections from the antennas.
04:40Those are good initial steps.
05:11With so many satellites in orbit, the space traffic management problems are huge.
05:18So you have all these satellites, and they're going in all different directions at tens of thousands of kilometers an hour.
05:26Suppose you have a satellite that you think is going to hit another one.
05:30So you move it, but you have to be sure before you move it that where you move it, you're not going to hit some other satellite.
05:38And if all the satellites are maneuvering all the time to avoid each other, it gets to be an extremely difficult problem.
05:45The Kessler syndrome, Don Kessler, a great aerodynamics expert back in the day, predicted this.
06:07If you have satellites hitting one another, then the debris from that collision can then hit other satellites, and you can get a chain reaction.
06:16And all of these billions of dollars of super expensive electronics whizzing around the Earth could turn into shrapnel like Saturn's rings, right?
06:27And you wouldn't be able to use space.
06:29So that's the nightmare scenario.
06:31I'm a little less worried about that for the new Starlink plan because their satellites are low enough that most of the debris from a collision would reenter reasonably quickly.
07:01The contribution of astrophysics to understanding our own planet is significant.
07:29A lot of the early work on climate change came from studying the atmospheres of other planets and thinking about, oh, we don't want our planet to get like that.
07:39One of the astrophysics areas that's most impacted by the Starlink satellites potentially is this search for asteroids that might hit the Earth.
07:48So we really don't want to miss one of those.
07:50I think it's not just a purely academic thing.
07:58It's something that is of use to society and should be considered.
08:20We really want to preserve the night sky for future generations, for current generations to be able to see around the world the constellations as they know them.
08:49Maybe having this cheap space internet is worth losing that, but we should have the discussion.
09:01We shouldn't just have it happen without thinking through it.