Report: Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Satellite Systems Like Starlink Cause Environmental Harm Regulators Didn’t Prepare For
from the first-do-no-harm dept
Last June scientists warned that low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites constantly burning up in orbit could release chemicals that could undermine the progress we’ve made repairing the ozone layer. Researchers at USC noted that at peak, 1,005 U.S. tons of aluminum will fall to Earth, releasing 397 U.S. tons of aluminum oxides per year to the atmosphere, an increase of 646% over natural levels.
Numerous companies, most notably Elon Musk’s Starlink and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, are working on launching tens of thousands of small LEO satellites in the coming years. A new report by U.S. PIRG adds to concerns that these launches haven’t been thought through environmentally, noting that the disposable nature of such satellites means 29 tons of satellites will re-enter our atmosphere every day at peak.
After years of delays, the FCC did recently release rules requiring that satellites be removed from orbit within five years to help minimize “space junk.” But the organization notes that very little if any thought was given by innovation-cowed regulators toward the environmental impact of so many smaller satellites constantly burning up in orbit:
“We shouldn’t rush into deploying an untested and under-researched technology into new environments without comprehensive review. Over just five years Starlink has launched more than 6,000 units and now make up more than 60% of all satellites. The new space race took off faster than governments were able to act.”
The steady launches are also a notable pollution concern, the report notes, releasing “soot in the atmosphere equivalent to 7 million diesel dump trucks circling the globe, each year.” Space X has consistently played fast and loose with environmental regulations, with regulators even in lax Texas starting to give the company grief for releasing significant pollutants into nearby bodies of water.
These concerns are on top of additional complaints that the light pollution created by these LEO satellites are significantly harming astronomical research in a way that can never be fully mitigated. And again, the problems we’re seeing now are predominately caused by Musk’s Starlink. Bezos and other companies plan to launch hundreds of thousands of more satellites over time.
SpaceX’s Starlink service can be a game changer for those completely out of range of broadband access. It’s also proven useful during environmental emergencies and war. Getting several hundred megabits per second in the middle of nowhere is a decidedly good thing, assuming you can afford the $120 a month subscription cost and up front hardware costs.
But while Starlink is great for global battlefields, vacation homes, yachts, and RVs, it’s not truly fixing the biggest problem in U.S. broadband right now: affordability. It lacks the capacity to really drive competition at the scale it’s needed to drive down rates, and as its userbase grows it’s inevitably going to require more and more heavy-handed network management tricks to ensure usability.
So while these LEO services are a helpful niche solution to fill in the gaps, they come with some fairly notable caveats, and it’s generally more economically and environmentally sound to prioritize the deployment of fiber and then fill in the rest with 5G and fixed wireless. It’s a major reason why the Biden FCC retracted a wasteful billion-dollar Trump handout to Starlink, something that made MAGA cry.
Filed Under: constellations, environment, fcc, leo, low earth orbit, ozone layer, satellite, starlink
Companies: spacex, starlink
Comments on “Report: Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Satellite Systems Like Starlink Cause Environmental Harm Regulators Didn’t Prepare For”
There's another problem with satellite-based connectivity
I’m going to be deliberately vague, but anyone who’s interested in this topic will be able to track down what I’m talking about.
These systems are subject to a class of attacks that are (a) difficult to launch against terrestrial networks and (b) somewhere between difficult and impossible to fix in space. This problem exists because the people deploying these satellites blithely presumed an adversary-free environment and hoped for the best. But as I hope everyone knows, that’s not realistic.
So while additional network capacity that reaches additional locations and people is, in principle, a good thing, this particular network capacity is rather brittle, and as a consequence, we should expect that the first adversary with sufficient resources will succeed in taking it out. That event, if it happens, will cut off some number of locations/people, and will shift all that network traffic to ground-based networks, and that in turn will cause ripple effects. It remains to be seen whether those are tolerable or disruptive.
Sometimes I think some people want to ruin the enviroment to spite those who would not let them ruin the enviroment.
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“Sometimes I think some people want to ruin the environment to spite those who would not let them ruin the environment.”
and they somehow do not realize they are shooting themselves in the foot – so to speak.
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How Trump could care about temperature or ocean raise in 2050 or 2100, he may has ten years left to live. And he has even lived in a time where “ecology” (coined during 1960s) was invented yet.
Of courses, for millennials that could know the end of this century (if the humanity is not wiped out since then), and will raise children that will live by then, it’s another story.
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Hahahahaha.
This is the best time ever to be alive, and an even better time to breed and make heirs!
If not for the spread of oil-fueled industrialization, there is a good chance most of us would either be toiling as saleable objects of commerce or as dirt poor peasants on some spit of feudal land under the panopticon of a gangster’s stone fortress. We would enjoy little choice in how we spend our time or chance of upward mobility, no chance to participate in politics, and no life-sustaining technologies like good nutrition, antibiotics, or modern healthcare.
Most people alive today live lifestyles free from the kingdoms of antiquity thanks largely to the mass politics fueled by fossilized energy.
It’s a myth that anthropogenic climate warming poses any threat to our future. These are the best times and they’ll only get better (especially once we seal the border and deport all the illegal aliens back to their shitholes in the Global South)!
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Someone get this guy a thalidomide and asbestos sandwich. The taste of FREEDOM!
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In the past, there were programs to encourage the masses to not do drugs, perhaps you missed that?
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You missed that oil companies are responsible for the suppression of any technology that threatened their energy dominance.
Think about where we would be today if research into solar and battery technology hadn’t been kneecapped for the last 100 years.
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I can’t even imagine the amount of cognitive dissonance it takes to first give an example of the insane growth that embracing a new technology (oil) and massive immigration to the United States produced for us, then using that as a reason to stop embracing other new technologies, and stop immigration into the United States.
How stupid do you have to be to not realize how diametrically opposed those two things are to each other?
If one new technology a century ago brought this insane amount of growth in such a short period of time, let’s embrace new technologies! If the insane amount of immigration brought the kind of growth to the United States, let’s bring them all in, and embrace the stranger from another country.
For these people, it’s about “winning”, by having the most zeros under your personal control. If the world gets fucked along the way, that’s fine.
needs comparison
How large is that environmental impact compared to the constantly incoming meteorites?
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The journal study answers your question. Here’s the link, and there are more details, but I’ve attached the relevant part of the synopsis below.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL109280
Further in the article there’s an even more detailed breakdown:
Tl;dr, there is a relatively small amount of aluminum coming from meteorites.
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Hey, thanks. Much appreciated.
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Orbital junk re-entering is probably bit more than from space rocks. In addition, space rocks usually do not have a lot of aluminum.
fta:”Researchers at USC noted that at peak, 1,005 U.S. tons of aluminum will fall to Earth, releasing 397 U.S. tons of aluminum oxides per year to the atmosphere, an increase of 646% over natural levels.”