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Summary<\/p>\n
Around 10,000 Starlink satellites represent more than two-thirds of all satellites in low orbit, and SpaceX has ambitions to launch a million more \u2014 raising serious environmental and safety concerns.<\/p>\n
Usually satellites burn up on re-entry, leaving heavy metals and plastics in the atmosphere, but sometimes they leave debris on the ground. Canadians who live near the 50th parallel are under the densest band of satellites.<\/p>\n
Currently, Canada has no reporting system for space debris and no ability to limit the number of satellites launched into orbit. Existing space laws do not apply to private companies such as SpaceX and space is not covered by any environmental regulations.<\/p>\n
Billions of people watched in awe as the Artemis II mission took an astronaut crew that included Canadian Jeremy Hansen around the moon and back. It was an awe-inspiring moment for space exploration \u2014 but not all the news from space is good for Earth.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There are thousands of satellites in low orbit, which means 2,000 kilometres or less above the earth. Many were sent there by Elon Musk-owned SpaceX, which launched its first Starlink satellite in 2019 and has come to dominate the sky, representing more than two-thirds of all satellites in orbit. Wherever you are in Canada, when you look up at the increasingly bright night sky, you are seeing more satellites and fewer stars<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Starlink is an internet provider used by rural farmers, northern First Nations and airplane passengers criss-crossing Canadian skies. Each of its satellites has a lifespan of roughly five years, after which they re-enter Earth\u2019s atmosphere at a rate of one or two satellites per day.\u00a0<\/p>\n At this point, they become what\u2019s known as space junk \u2014 burning up entirely or, occasionally, scattering debris. But those occasions will become more common if SpaceX fulfills its ambitions to launch a lot more satellites in the years to come, coinciding with the explosion in data centres and artificial intelligence. That would mean more light pollution in the night sky and more space junk falling back to Earth.<\/p>\n Samantha Lawler is a professor of astronomy with the University of Regina and goat farmer \u2014 and she is concerned about space junk. She spoke with us from her farm in Saskatchewan (where she did not use Starlink to connect to Zoom) about why we should be concerned about the growing number of satellites over Canada \u2014 including the potential for satellite collisions that could make low orbit unusable for everyone, a scenario called Kessler syndrome.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re right on the edge of that already,\u201d she said, adding that someone needs to take on the engineering challenge of providing rural internet and other services with fewer satellites. \u201cThere is a limit to how many we can safely have in orbit, and I think we\u2019ve crossed that limit.\u201d<\/p>\n SpaceX didn\u2019t respond to The Narwhal\u2019s questions about the environmental or safety impacts of their plan, and the Canadian Space Agency didn\u2019t respond when asked if and when an official reporting system might be created. But Lawler had a lot more to say about the current lack of regulations protecting us from their impacts in the sky \u2014 or here on Earth.<\/p>\n This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n What\u2019s your work all about?\u00a0<\/p>\n I study orbital dynamics in the Kuiper belt \u2014 so, looking at small icy rocks in the outer solar system and measuring their orbits. I started my position at the University of Regina and moved to a farm with access to dark skies in 2019, right when the first Starlink satellites launched, so I could watch the change in my night sky that I suddenly had access to and see the change in my research data, too. Increasingly, there were more and more satellite streaks in my data.<\/p>\n So, I had this unique perspective of seeing that wow, this was pretty bad, and it\u2019s going to get a lot worse.<\/p>\n In 2021, you published an article that said one out of every 15 points of light in the night sky<\/a> would soon be a satellite, not a star. At the time, what were the environmental and scientific concerns about that figure?<\/p>\n So, at the time, that one in 15 represented 65,000 satellites \u2014 which, when we wrote that paper, I thought was ridiculous. Like, there\u2019s no way we\u2019ll ever get to that. But here we are at around 15,000 with no signs of slowing down. So we might get there, and now there are proposals for millions of satellites<\/a>. But at the time, I think very few astronomers \u2014 and almost no one outside the astronomy community \u2014 had any idea how bad this was.\u00a0<\/p>\n There was a small group of astronomers that noticed, \u201cHey, this is very bad for astronomy. But have you thought about how many of these are going to be burning up, and how many are going to be launched, and how much danger there is in orbit?\u201d I think that\u2019s starting to change now \u2014 I\u2019m glad that more people are aware of the issues, but they continue to get worse.<\/p>\n So, in the vein of things getting worse, in January SpaceX requested the authority of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to launch \u2018a constellation of a million satellites\u2019 to serve as an orbital data centre. How much worse would a million satellites be?<\/p>\n It\u2019s so bad in every possible way. There\u2019s no way we can get to a million satellites \u2014 there will be collisions in space and we\u2019ll be in full Kessler syndrome before we get there. But if somehow, they managed not to crash, they have five-year lifetimes. That would be one re-entry every three minutes. And those satellites would have to be bigger than Starlink satellites because of the complexity of a data centre versus an internet provider, right? In some of the articles we were writing quickly<\/a>, we were estimating two tonnes per satellite, but it sounds like from various things SpaceX has released that they\u2019ll actually be much bigger than that<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Just to linger on that for a minute \u2014 all satellites that go up eventually have to come down, and they usually burn up on re-entry. What happens when they don\u2019t?<\/p>\n So everything that\u2019s in low Earth orbit, which is most of the satellites \u2014 including all of the 10,000-plus Starlink satellites \u2014 at the end of their life, they get burned up in Earth\u2019s atmosphere, because it\u2019s convenient. And so far, it looks like Starlink is actually doing a pretty good job of burning up. There was one piece of a Starlink satellite that was found in a farm in Saskatchewan<\/a> a couple of years ago, but they seem to be doing a pretty good job.\u00a0<\/p>\n What that means, though, is that all the mass of the satellites \u2014 the solar panels, plastic, metal, batteries \u2014 it\u2019s all getting melted and deposited in the upper atmosphere. So, that\u2019s not a good thing. There was a period of time, about six months, where Starlink burned up 500 satellites. That\u2019s around three per day. In that time period, they exceeded the natural infall rate from meteorites by at least twice as much \u2014 so, adding at least twice as much aluminium as what naturally comes into the atmosphere every day for six months.<\/p>\n So what does that do? We don\u2019t actually know. There are a few preliminary studies showing this aluminum can become alumina, which can cause ozone depletion and change temperatures in the upper atmosphere, but we don\u2019t know the full effects. And because space is not legally considered an environment, all satellites launched from the U.S. are categorically excluded from any kind of environmental regulations.<\/p>\n If they get to their steady state of having 42,000 Starlink satellites<\/a> alone \u2014 that\u2019s only one of many mega-constellations they have planned \u2014 that\u2019s something like one satellite being burned up every hour in the atmosphere. These are satellites half the size of a Ford F-150 pickup truck. They\u2019re not small. That\u2019s a lot of metal being added to the upper atmosphere, and we don\u2019t know the full effects of it.<\/p>\n Why is this changing so rapidly? In 2019, Starlink launched its first satellite \u2014 seven years later,\u00a0 we are looking at the possibility of mega-constellations that will blot out the stars?<\/p>\n SpaceX does all the launching \u2014 all the other mega-constellation companies [such as One Web and Amazon\u2019s LEO] are using SpaceX to get to orbit. It has the infrastructure to do all the launches, they have a lot of U.S. government funding to do those launches, so they\u2019re doing them very, very quickly. It\u2019s very impressive engineering, it just ignores so many of the larger effects.<\/p>\n Dive deeper on this topic<\/p>\n We\u2019re in different provinces, but you and I \u2014 and most Canadians \u2014 live close to the 50th parallel. You\u2019ve mentioned people on our latitude are particularly affected by satellites. For Canadians who aren\u2019t experts looking for data in the sky, what will they be seeing?<\/p>\n I know in my sky, there\u2019s a line where I can always see a Starlink satellite in motion. Just always. So, people might notice that. We are also the highest-risk for satellites that aren\u2019t burning up completely, because they\u2019re right over our heads. These are all uncontrolled re-entries, so they just re-enter somewhere along their orbit, and we\u2019re under the densest part. I think that was demonstrated by the piece that was found in Saskatchewan.\u00a0<\/p>\n That was in 2024, when a farmer found a piece of SpaceX debris on his farm?<\/p>\n Actually, there are two separate things: one was a big debris fall in Ituna, Sask.<\/a>, which was part of the SpaceX Dragon truck. It\u2019s part of the capsule that brings astronauts up to the space station. When it doesn\u2019t burn up completely, it falls \u2014 so that was a bunch of very large pieces discovered across many farms. I know of six pieces from that, but there are probably more that people haven\u2019t reported because there is no way to report them. There\u2019s no official reporting system.\u00a0<\/p>\n The second incident was a smaller piece from a Starlink satellite, about the size of a laptop, discovered near Hodgeville, Sask.<\/p>\n Dive deeper on this topic<\/p>\n With the Ituna debris, it was reported to the Canadian government, and there was some kind of interaction between the Canadian and U.S. governments. In Ituna, SpaceX contacted the farmers directly and came to pick up the pieces. With Hodgeville, the farmer got in touch with SpaceX, and they had him FedEx [the debris] back. So no one in the Canadian government knew about it, which is bad.<\/p>\n The Ituna debris fall was spectacular because the pieces were so large and there were so many. But the Starlink debris is much scarier to me, because there are 10,000 of these over our heads, and if they\u2019re not burning up completely, then that\u2019s a lot of pieces that are hitting the ground. Here in Saskatchewan \u2014 I look out my window and it\u2019s just bare fields. It\u2019s the easiest place to find the pieces. But how many pieces are we not finding? These pieces look like something that fell off a car; if you found one in the city, you wouldn\u2019t think it was space junk.\u00a0<\/p>\n Every time there\u2019s a re-entry, they just roll the dice, like, \u201cIt\u2019ll probably burn up.\u201d But we don\u2019t actually know, there\u2019s no data released on that, and the only way we find out if they aren\u2019t burning up completely is if we find pieces on the ground.<\/p>\n You\u2019ve said there\u2019s no reporting system in Canada \u2014 do you think that will change?<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been in touch with the Canadian Space Agency and they say they are working on a plan. But I don\u2019t know. Aaron Boley at the Outer Space Institute<\/a> has set up an email address \u2014 [email\u00a0protected]<\/a> \u2014 but it\u2019s not official. We\u2019re astronomers, we\u2019re not supposed to be collecting this, but no one else is.\u00a0<\/p>\n After I heard a Starlink piece had fallen in Saskatchewan, I got in touch with the farmer by going on the Evan Bray radio show<\/a> \u2014 like, the lunchtime farmer call-in show, where I go to talk about astronomy all the time \u2014 and asking who found it. Saskatchewan is a giant small town, so I actually got in touch with the guy by doing that.\u00a0<\/p>\n And he mentioned that his neighbour has some space junk too, and sent me a photo of this big piece of, like, corrugated metal. I was like, \u201cCome on, that\u2019s not space junk \u2014 it\u2019s a piece of tractor or something.\u201d But then he sent me a letter that this guy got from the Canadian government back in 1980, saying, \u201cThank you for sending us this piece of a Soviet rocket.\u201d So, Saskatchewan has been the debris detector for decades.<\/p>\n So maybe 1980 was the time for the Canadian government to start thinking about a space debris plan! But what kind of power does it have?<\/p>\n Everything that goes into orbit is covered by the Outer Space Treaty<\/a> and the Liability Convention<\/a>, which are these Apollo-era treaties, written at a time when only the U.S. and the Soviet Union were launching stuff into orbit. They\u2019re really not written for private companies. It\u2019s just not set up for our current situation, where most of the satellites are owned by private corporations \u2014 by one private corporation, mostly.<\/p>\n Senator Paula Simons<\/a> has launched a Senate inquiry<\/a> into space junk falling on Canada, which is awesome. So there is starting to be some interest. But nothing has really happened substantively.<\/p>\n What feels possible in terms of Canada\u2019s leverage here? It\u2019s hard to imagine the U.S. being receptive to Canada saying, \u201cHey, slow down the satellite launches until we have a legislative and accountability framework in place.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard, because Canada could say, \u201cSpaceX, you are causing our taxpayer-funded astronomy research to suffer, so you need to pay a fine.\u201d But then SpaceX could turn around and say, \u201cOkay, the Canadian market isn\u2019t that big, we just won\u2019t broadcast to you.\u201d<\/p>\n A lot of Canadians are benefitting from Starlink right now \u2014 which I don\u2019t think is a good idea, but rural internet is terrible. And then Canada would get all of the downsides and none of the upsides.<\/p>\n Is it fair to say SpaceX has a kind of monopoly on space now?<\/p>\n SpaceX controls orbit, totally. They have two-thirds of all satellites in low orbit and if you want to go into space, you effectively have to ask them for permission. During the Artemis launch, they had all these blackout periods where there were Starlink satellites they had to avoid. By their own admission, Starlink does a collision avoidance manoeuvre every two minutes.\u00a0<\/p>\n I wrote a paper with a bunch of other people that\u2019s being reviewed, but in June, when we wrote it, it predicted that it would take five-and-a-half days for a catastrophic collision [between satellites] to happen if there were no avoidance manoeuvres. It\u2019s since dropped to three days. So if SpaceX gets hacked, or there\u2019s a bad software update, or a giant solar storm, the time we have to avoid a giant collision in orbit is getting shorter and shorter. That\u2019s a bad situation.\u00a0<\/p>\n Why does SpaceX even need 42,000 satellites to provide internet, if OneWeb is doing it with 800? They\u2019ve never been asked to justify the number.<\/p>\n Hmm, all this sounds really bad. Is there anything Canadians can or should be doing?<\/p>\n We need alternatives on the ground to these internet provider mega-constellations. We need better rural internet. So something Canadians can do very easily is write to all levels of government about getting better internet<\/a> to rural and remote communities, especially First Nations<\/a>. I mean, no wonder everyone is using Starlink \u2014 I live 10 kilometres from the nearest town and I can connect to power lines and phone lines and natural gas lines but I can\u2019t connect to broadband internet.\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s something we can all advocate for \u2014 because if people have good internet options based in Canada, then they don\u2019t need to rely on an American billionaire-owned company.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Summary Around 10,000 Starlink satellites represent more than two-thirds of all satellites in low orbit, and SpaceX has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":621269,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[49,48,66,306],"class_list":["post-621268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=621268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621268\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/621269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=621268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=621268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=621268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Stars](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/QA_Space-Junk_Night_Sky_4_WEBjpg.jpg\"\/)
If SpaceX realizes its ambition to launch a million satellites into Earth\u2019s orbit, the light pollution they cause will overwhelm the night sky. Photo: Jeanine Holowatuik \/ Northern Escape Photography<\/p>\n![\"Astronomer](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Sam-Lawler-With-Sapce-Junk-scaled.jpg\"\/)
\u201cThere is a limit to how many [satellites] we can safely have in orbit, and I think we\u2019ve crossed that limit,\u201d said astronomer Sam Lawler, seen here with a collection of space junk. Photo: Supplied by Sam Lawler<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/QA_Space-Junk_Night_Sky_1_WEB-1024x683.jpg\"\/)
There is no formal system for reporting space junk that falls to Canada, and the international treaties that govern orbiting satellites date to the Apollo era, when private companies launching satellites were unheard of. Photo: Jeanine Holowatuik \/ Northern Escape Photography<\/p>\n