<\/p>\n Barentine spoke to Space.com on behalf of a group of astronomers who are raising objections against SpaceX<\/a>‘s application to launch the constellation, which the company filed with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Jan. 30.<\/p>\n Article continues below <\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n Starlink currently consists of around 10,000 satellites<\/a>. Those spacecraft are visible to the naked eye only shortly after launch, because they dim as they raise their orbital altitude. The Starlinks still leave streaks in telescope images, but SpaceX has, after consultations with the astronomy community,<\/a> managed to reduce the satellites’ brightness by using less reflective materials and tilting reflective components like solar panels away from Earth. The brightness of newer Starlink satellites dropped to just above the limit recommended by the International Astronomical Union<\/a> to prevent interference with astronomical observations. SpaceX’s new data-center plan, however, threatens to thwart this progress, according to Barentine.<\/p>\n “It really feels like it’s undermining what we have achieved in the last few years, which wasn’t ideal for astronomy, but was a far cry from what we feared in 2019 when the Starlink program began,” he told Space.com. “We felt we were heading in the right direction that was reasonably sustainable. And this feels like a complete reversal of that.”<\/p>\n According to some estimates<\/a>, each of the orbiting data centers could be up to 330 feet (100 meters) long, circling Earth at altitudes between 310 miles and 1,243 miles (500 to 2000 kilometers) pole to pole with a constant exposure to sunlight.<\/p>\n “The other constellations that we have dealt with so far are mostly at lower altitudes and in lower-inclination orbits,” Barentine said. “That means the satellites spend most of their time in Earth’s shadow. We really don’t see them very much in the middle of the night, or they are not that bright. But the data centers will be in high-inclination orbits and will be fully illuminated by sunlight even as seen from the ground at midnight.”<\/p>\n Barentine described the proposal as a “vastly different prospect” compared to all other existing and planned constellations.<\/p>\n “This is a challenge unlike any we have encountered thus far in this new era of commercial space,” he said.<\/p>\n The development comes just as the astronomical world brings online some of the most powerful sky-observing machines of all time, designed to push the limits of the human understanding of the universe<\/a>. These big ground-based scopes, including the $10 billion Vera Rubin Observatory<\/a>, opened last year, or the $2 billion Extremely Large Telescope<\/a> currently under construction in Chile, will have their observations severely obstructed by those satellites.<\/p>\n What to read next<\/p>\n “We could schedule our observations so that we aren’t looking in the direction of the satellite when it’s passing or close the shutter in front of our cameras and reopen it later on,” said Barentine. “But at some point, the amount of time the shutter is closed starts degrading your observations. And I worry that, with more than a million objects, the shutter would be closed more than it would be open.”<\/p>\n In addition, Barentine and his colleagues estimate that, with the expected rate of replacement of the constellation’s satellites with newer technology, one old spacecraft would be burning up in Earth’s atmosphere<\/a> every three minutes. This mass incineration of metal would result in a steep increase in concentrations<\/a> of potentially dangerous pollutants such as aluminum oxide and lithium in the upper atmosphere, which could lead to ozone depletion and temperature changes.<\/p>\n
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