Short Wave - SpaceX's Satellite Swarm: Could It Hurt Astronomy?

Episode Date: November 13, 2019

The private space company run by Elon Musk launched 60 satellites into orbit this week. Science correspondent Geoff Brumfiel explains why astronomers worry that kind of traffic — if it continues unabated — could permanently alter their ability to observe the night sky. Follow host Maddie Sofia on Twitter @maddie_sofia. Email the show at [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Maddie Safai here, and I'm here with science correspondent Jeff Brumfield to talk about space. So something happened up there this week, huh? Yep, that's right. On Monday, Veterans Day, the commercial spaceflight company, SpaceX, launched a rocket. One, zero. Ignition. Liftoff with gratitude to our veterans today and always go USA.

Patriotic and propulsive. Indeed, it is. But here's the thing. Rockets launch satellites usually. But on board this rocket, there wasn't just one satellite or two. There were 60. Dang. Yeah, it's a lot of satellites.

And this is actually the second time SpaceX has launched 60 satellites this year alone. Okay, that sounds cool, I think? It's cool, yeah, but there's a problem. There are literally hundreds more satellites heading into low Earth orbit in 2020, and all that traffic gets got scientists, and space junk experts really worried. So today on the show, what the swarm of SpaceX satellites is for and why it has some people concerned about the future of astronomy.

Okay, Jeff, I get it. Satellites, they do stuff in space. They're very useful. I can definitely understand why you'd need some up there. But like hundreds of them, what is going on? Well, to understand that, we need to talk about the company SpaceX. And it was founded by PayPal billionaire Elon Musk. I think it's safe to say it revolutionized spaceflight in ways that nobody expected.

First off, they can land the boosters on their rockets back on Earth. Not only can they land these boosters, but they can also reuse them, and they're working on reusing other parts of the rocket, too. All of this recycling lowers the cost of launch, and that makes SpaceX a super valuable company. But here's the thing. The satellite launch market just actually isn't that big. There aren't that many satellites launched each year.

SpaceX is currently valued at around $30 billion, but its annual revenue is actually only a little fraction of that. If it's going to justify that valuation, it's going to have to generate an awful lot more revenue in the future. Tim Ferrar runs TMF Associates, a satellite communications consultancy. And the only realistic way to do that in the next few years is to get into the communications business. The communications business, like the interwebs? Exactly. SpaceX is doing broadband internet from space, and it's launching this network of satellites called Starlink to provide broadband to pretty much every point on Earth. And that launch you heard earlier, that was the latest batch of Starlink satellites going up.

Now, eventually, there's going to be thousands of them. Ferrer says that the broadband market's around a trillion dollars, and if these satellites help SpaceX grab even a tiny percentage of that, that is big money for this company. Elon will finally be rich. That's right. So SpaceX launches its first Starlink carrying rocket in May of this year. And everything goes super smoothly, and the satellites, they just kind of fan out. Spacecraft, so they really are just slowly fanning out like a deck of cards into space. But back on Earth, there's this aspiring astronomer.

My name is Victoria Gerges, and I'm a public programs educator at Lola. observatory. So the Lowell Observatory is in Flagstaff, Arizona, and I spoke to her back in June after that first launch. Now, she was showing a bunch of visitors some distant galaxies when this train of 60 Starlink satellites goes through the field of her camera. My first immediate reaction was, that's visually kind of cool. But my second reaction was, man, you can't see a single galaxy. Because the satellites were just created a bunch of streaks, you know, if you've ever had. It was like a terrible photo bomb is what you're telling me. It was absolutely a terrible photo bomb.

And other astronomers have noticed this too. This is going to be a big deal for professional astronomy. How so? Well, I want to introduce you to another professional astronomer named Tony Tyson. And he is the chief scientist for this really ambitious project called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. Love it. They called LSST for short. The idea is to take a picture.

of the entire sky over and over again. Every night we will tile the entire visible sky with a thousand exposures visiting a thousand different pieces of the sky. And this will go on every night for 10 years, creating, in essence, then, a digital color motion picture of the universe. So the goal here is to see how the universe is changing. You know, we think about the stars and the heavens as being this very static, fixed thing.

But there's a lot of stuff that goes out. on up there that you just can't catch, and this very expensive telescope is supposed to see all of it. So this telescope is being constructed in Chile. And honestly, Tony Tyson wasn't really thinking about satellites being launched out of Florida. I didn't make a habit of reading the Federal Communications Commission filings for satellites. Why not? Tittalating. Had I done that, I would have been aware of it. Anyway, so Tyson is the chief scientist. He's very focused on getting this telescope built, and that's why he's actually working. working on, when all of a sudden he starts seeing these media reports and pictures on Twitter,

streaks across the cameras of amateur astronomers. And they were incredibly bright, and you could just see them. You don't need a binoculars or telescope or anything. And he thinks, uh-oh, but, you know, he doesn't panic. He's a scientist, so first he waits for the... We panic plenty, but go on. Well, you know, he tries to be analytical about it. So he and his team run a lot of tests, and they find out of the...

And they find there's no way around it. The satellites are probably going to mess up these pictures. So what are they going to do? The only real option is to point the telescope where the satellites aren't. So they're going to have to constantly be moving it around to keep the satellites out of the field of view. If you knew precisely where they were when they were and could predict where they're going to be, LSST can avoid looking there. But that kind of brings us to another big problem, Maddie. Tony isn't the only one who needs to know where all these satellites are.

And do you know how we keep track for the world's satellites? I do not. Do you want to take a stab on it? GPS. They've got, no, wait, the satellites are GPS. Yeah, GPS are satellites. So that's not going to work. What actually happens is the job falls to the 18th Space Control Squadron of the U.S. Air Force.

And these folks maintain a network of telescopes and radars all over the world that tracks satellites currently in orbit. And they feed that data into a computer. But it's kind of an old computer. The underlying core system that came online in the 1990s early. Kind of old, Jeff? That was Brian Whedon. He's a former Air Force officer who's now at the Secure World Foundation, which worries about sustainability in space. Do you remember the 486 computers, Maddie?

You know I don't, Jeff. They were used for such classic games as the original Doom, Castle Wolfenstein. Solid, both solid. Killed a lot of time on that when I was a kid. Anyway, that technology is still being used. Those processors are still being used to track the world's satellites. Oh, okay, cool. I bet that's adequate.

I mean, you know, to be honest with you, satellites are kind of predictable in a lot of ways. So it's not the worst you could do, but this computer crunches the numbers. It spits out what are called conjunctions, which are basically close calls that could end in collisions. And somebody kind of gives that a quick look over, and then the system sends out an email. And the email essentially says, you know, your satellite so-and-so is predicted to have a close approach with this other space object two, three, four days into the future. And that's it. So you get an email from Space Squadron at hotmail.com. It's like, you're going to, okay.

I mean, I kind of expected more than that, like a quick text or a red alert or something faster. Maybe they got a Slack channel. I just something better than that. No, no. And guess what? These emails, like all emails, they can get lost. Yeah, that's what they do, Jeff. In fact, that's what happened a few months back.

A European Space Agency satellite was headed towards one of the Starlink satellites. and the agency predicted a possible collision. Now, they emailed SpaceX, but at least some of those emails seem to have gotten lost, and so did emails from the Air Force. The bottom line is that the space agency ended up moving their satellite. SpaceX said, oh, sorry, our bad. You know, it seemed to have been some internal communications problems. They promised to fix it.

But honestly, we don't worry. The current system just isn't going to work with thousands of new satellites flying around. It's probably the barely functional minimum to be able to handle this new situation. But it is very far from what we should have. And of course, if this somehow all gets messed up, it's a really bad situation. Satellites, when they collide, they create shrapnel. That could threaten other satellites. It's a big mess.

And there's honestly no way to clean it up. Jeff, this is making me very nervous, more nervous than usual. Well, let me try and put your mind at ease a little bit. I mean, I spoke to SpaceX for this story, and I spoke to to a rival company called OneWeb, which is also launching satellites next year. And they make clear to me, first of all, they really don't want anything bad to happen. Yeah, Jeff, nobody wants something bad to happen, but fine, go on. Well, I mean, beyond that, they, you know, have a financial incentive to make sure bad things don't happen.

That makes me more comfortable. You know, SpaceX is working for other countries. They're launching things to the International Space Station, which is in this sort of general area. they don't want to mess up this space. So they're doing a couple of things. They're trying to share their orbital data. They're equipping these satellites with automated anti-collision systems that they say can prevent, you know, these sorts of accidents. And they're taking other precautions.

Now, I'm not saying this is going to work out, but if something bad happens up there, it will be an accident. Okay. So what about the astronomers? They're in a much tougher spot. SpaceX has said they want to work with them. But as I said, these satellites reflect light, even if you paint them black, which SpaceX is considering doing. And, you know, we haven't talked about this, but there aren't a lot of rules in space. Tony Tyson says there's nothing really the astronomers can do to stop this.

There are no international regulations regarding light pollution from space interfering with optical astronomy. There should be, but there just aren't. And so it will take a long time for that to happen. and I think it probably will happen, but too late, I think. These satellites are going up now, and in the next year, SpaceX plans to launch hundreds. Its rival company is going to do the same, and Tony thinks that's going to change our sky forever. Okay, Jeff Brumfield. Thank you for the story. You're welcome.

I'm Maddie Safaya. We're back tomorrow with more shortwave from NPR.