Two years ago, communities across Northwest Alaska woke to find that they had no internet or cellphone service. A mammoth piece of arctic sea ice had scraped the ocean floor 34 miles north of Oliktok Point, cutting a fiber optic cable buried 13 feet underground, below about 90 feet of water. Overnight, residents suddenly couldn’t withdraw money from ATMs, set up doctors appointments or call 911.
It would take 14 weeks for the cable to be repaired, but by then, Eben Hopson, a photographer in Utqiagvik, had already made the jump to Starlink — a satellite internet option from Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
“It’s been a game changer,” Hopson tells me. “You bring a Starlink dish out there and plug it in. Two minutes later, you’ve got the whole world again in the palm of your hand.”
Starlink has kicked off a race to low-Earth orbit, or LEO — the sweet spot in the skies where satellite providers can beam down fast, low-latency internet to people like Hopson. When it launched in 2019, Starlink was joining around 2,000 satellites in the entire sky; an article published in Nature in 2020 determined that 100,000 satellites in the sky by 2030 is “not just feasible but quite likely.”
I’ve heard stories like Hopson’s a lot in my seven years reporting on the broadband industry and its technology. People in rural areas often tell me they have no internet options in their area — or crappy ones at best. Starlink essentially handed over a time machine and fast forwarded people in those places from 2005 to 2025 overnight. But as with any major technology shift there are potential consequences.
Starlink’s horde of satellites have contributed significantly to making space a perilously busy place. Scientists have been ringing alarm bells about the unintended consequences for the ozone layer, astronomical research and a sky cluttered with space junk — from decades of rocket launches and satellite deployments that have only increased in recent years — that poses a threat to internet providers like Starlink itself.
For as long as the internet’s been around, there have been those who can access and afford a speedy internet connection and those who can’t. This gap is referred to as the digital divide, with rural areas often being stuck with few (or just plain bad) options.
It’s an ironic twist: The satellites that we’re becoming so dependent on to help bridge this gap could be their own downfall.
How Starlink has helped close the digital divide
Most of us take our internet for granted. Like electricity, it’s part of our monthly budget, and we only really think about it when it goes out. In 1930, nearly nine in 10 urban and nonfarm rural homes had access to electricity, but only about one in 10 farms did. The gap isn’t quite as wide with internet, but the analogy holds: In 2019, the year Starlink launched its first satellites, 67% of rural Americans had access to download speeds of 100 megabits per second and upload speeds of 10Mbps, compared to 98% in urban areas.
“There’s really no comparison,” Edwin Walker, a retired electrical engineer in Chattaroy, Washington, tells me about his previous internet options. “We get 100 or 200 megabits per second downloads [with Starlink] and it’s reliable.” Walker says he had been getting around 10 to 20Mbps from his old provider.
Rural areas have been the last to get high-speed internet because of the prohibitive costs associated with installing fiber-optic lines to sparsely populated areas.
“Fiber is great, but our cost estimates show somewhere around $120 [thousand] to $130,000 per location just to connect it with fiber,” Greg Conte, director of the Texas Broadband Development Office, says about rural areas in West Texas. “You’re spending all that money to put in fiber — either on poles or on the ground — and the household may not even adopt it.”
It’s not a stretch to say Starlink revolutionized internet access in rural America seemingly overnight. The satellite internet company was launched in 2015 by SpaceX and has been a personal project of the tech billionaire. Its satellite dishes are about the size of a pizza box and can connect anywhere with a clear view of the sky. Starlink also debuted its Mini dish last summer, which is designed for internet on the go.
Starlink has grown to around 1.4 million subscribers in the US and 4 million globally since its debut in 2021. That’s only 1% of all internet connections in the country. That number might not sound noteworthy, but the homes that Starlink serves have been in the most stubbornly difficult-to-connect pockets of the country.
Satellite internet has been around since the days of dial-up, but its performance hasn’t changed much since then, either. Starlink’s great innovation was to put its satellites closer to Earth than its predecessors — about 342 miles above the ground, compared with over 22,000 miles for geostationary satellites used by providers like Hughesnet and Viasat.
For users, Starlink provides faster speeds due to its vastly larger fleet of satellites, but the more dramatic improvement is in latency, or the time it takes for data to travel from the dish on top of your house to a satellite in the sky.
According to Ookla speed tests, Starlink’s average latency time in the US was 62 milliseconds in 2023, compared with 681ms for Viasat and 886ms for Hughesnet. (Disclosure: Ookla is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.) That’s almost a full second between when you say something on a video call and the other person hears it (or 2 seconds if the other person also happens to be using Hughesnet).
In just a few years, millions of people who had slow internet — or no internet at all — suddenly had internet good enough for telehealth appointments, video calls with family or online gaming.
“Literally, it’s like you flipped a switch and we were brought into 2025,” Colby Hall, executive director of Shaping Our Appalachian Region, or SOAR, a nonprofit that works to drive economic growth in eastern Kentucky, told me.
But that connectivity has come at a cost — to both users and the world at large. An internet connection is only useful if you can afford it, and Starlink’s $120 monthly plan and $349 satellite dish are still out of reach for many Americans. A 2021 Pew survey found that 20% of people who don’t have a home internet subscription said the cost was the primary reason — the highest of any answer and well above the 9% who said service isn’t available.
“The digital divide is fundamentally tied to inequality,” says Christopher Ali, professor of telecommunications at Penn State University. “We often think that it’s an infrastructure issue, which is the case in rural and remote and Indigenous communities, but the reason most people don’t have internet is price.”
Starlink has also ushered in a new era for our skies. When SpaceX launched its first batch of Starlink satellites in May 2019, there were only around 2,000 operational satellites in the entire sky. Today, that number has grown to over 11,000 — nearly 7,000 of which belong to Starlink. SpaceX has said it hopes to eventually grow the number to 42,000.
Starlink is starting to be joined by competitors too. Amazon’s Project Kuiper plans to launch its first operational satellites in early 2025 and has permission from the Federal Communications Commission to deploy as many as 3,236 satellites.
“It’s not just about Starlink. It’s about everybody who wants to operate in space,” says Hugh Lewis, a professor of astronautics at the University of Southampton. “I do not think that we can operate the number of spacecraft safely that we have now, let alone the numbers that are coming down the pipeline.”
Starlink didn’t respond to CNET’s request for comment on this story.
Starlink has been a game changer in rural areas
The truth is, most people in the US don’t need Starlink. The most recent FCC data shows that 90% of addresses are served by cable or fiber internet, which is significantly faster and cheaper than Starlink. But for that remaining 10%, it’s proven to be a godsend.
Maine has the second-highest percentage of residents living in rural areas of any state, with many of them living in exceptionally remote places.
“The nature of population density in Maine is such that it drops so quickly,” says Brian Allenby, senior director with the Maine Connectivity Authority. “When you’re down to one or two locations per mile, LEO service really is the most cost-effective.”
Maine’s broadband coverage.
In Maine, 9,000 homes currently have no internet providers operating at their address at all. “This is folks who when you look at the FCC map, there is no technology code. The upload download speeds are zero over zero,” Allenby says.
To address those areas, the state recently began offering free Starlink dishes to residents in what Gov. Janet Mills called “Maine’s hardest-to-reach locations.” That’s an essential piece of the puzzle, say digital equity advocates.
“The cost of Starlink is a serious barrier,” says Angela Siefer, the executive director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance. “It’s a real solution in places where there aren’t other technologies, but it’s only a real solution if you can afford it.”
Starlink’s satellite dishes start at $349, and its cheapest plan costs $120 a month — almost twice as much as the average internet bill in the US. In a survey of households with annual incomes under $50,000, more than half of respondents said an internet bill up to $75 was unaffordable.
Starlink’s prices are high, but they’re not out of line with what many rural residents were already paying. Geostationary satellite providers like Hughesnet and Viasat — the only other options for internet in many rural areas — have upfront equipment costs of $400 and $250, respectively, with much slower speeds and stingier data caps than Starlink.
“It’s less than what I was paying for,” Walker says. Before Starlink was available, he used a local fixed wireless provider — a connection type that uses radio frequencies instead of physical cables — that charged $125 monthly for 20Mbps speeds.
Hopson said the internet service providers in his area are pricier and slower than Starlink. “I know a lot more people that have Starlink because of how cheap it is.”
Before Starlink, Hopson told me he was paying $200 a month for speeds below 1Mbps and data caps of 20GB a month — limitations that made his work as a photographer challenging. “It took maybe a day, two days to upload one video to Google Drive. With Starlink, it takes 2 minutes,” Hopson says.
SOAR began providing free Starlink equipment and one year of free service to around 90 low-income, senior households in the most difficult-to-reach parts of the state. In the initial pilot program, more than half of the newly connected users said they used Starlink primarily to access telehealth services.
“Most of our clients were paying $150, $200 a month for geostationary,” Hall, SOAR’s executive director, says. “Even though we prepaid for the first 12 months, we knew that they would be able to keep going [with Starlink] after that.” Hall says about 95% of clients in SOAR’s pilot program continued paying for Starlink after the year of free service was up.
In 2021, Congress passed the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program — the largest ever federal investment in broadband by a country mile — with the goal of expanding infrastructure to these areas to close the digital divide for good. BEAD prioritized building out fiber infrastructure but made exceptions for exceptionally rural and hard-to-reach areas for satellite providers like Starlink.
One contentious point in BEAD’s fine print is that internet plans must be affordable. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the organization that distributes BEAD funds, requires that internet providers applying for funds must ensure that “high-quality broadband services are available to all middle-class families…at reasonable prices.” While “reasonable” is somewhat ambiguous, a 2023 Pew analysis found that “reasonable prices” could range from $84.79 in the South to $107.64 in the Northeast.
While Starlink’s prices are still too steep for many people, states are struggling to find other options in rural areas.
Conte tells me that his office has had trouble finding internet providers willing to take grant money to build fiber networks to rural areas in Texas.
“Some of the counties that we selected for that, we didn’t even receive any bids on,” Conte says. For example, one county four times the size of Rhode Island has fewer than a thousand homes and businesses in it, Conte says.
Still, BEAD’s requirements are clear: If an internet provider wants to take federal money, service has to be available at “reasonable prices” and it must deliver the FCC’s minimum definition of broadband: 100Mbps download speed, 20Mbps upload speed and latency of less than or equal to 100 milliseconds.
That’s something Starlink hasn’t proven it can do yet.
Can Starlink keep up with the future?
A year ago, the FCC increased the download/upload speeds in its definition of broadband from 25/3Mbps to 100/20Mbps, with the long-term goal of reaching 1,000/500Mbps. That might sound extreme when it takes only about 4Mbps to hop on a Zoom meeting, but it follows an often-cited rule of thumb the internet industry calls Nielsen’s law, which states that a high-end internet user’s connection speed grows by roughly 50% each year, doubling every 21 months — an observation that has held true since 1983.
Source: Ookla
The most recent data from Ookla — albeit a year old — shows that Starlink users are getting 65/10Mbps on average, with 58 milliseconds of latency. In 2022, Starlink was denied nearly $900 million in rural broadband subsidies because it failed to hit that 100/20Mbps benchmark. Musk said on X in January 2024 that the idea that Starlink had failed to reach these speeds was “utterly false” and that “Starlink exceeds that right now.”
“Early Starlink, before anything got launched, they were saying, ‘We’re going to compete with fiber for everybody.’ Then it was, ‘We’re going to compete with fiber for some.’ Then it’s, ‘We’re going to offer good enough broadband for rural,'” Ali, the Penn State professor, says. “They’ve really tampered down expectations. Will the speeds go up as the technology improves? Sure, but how long is that going to take?”
Ookla data shows that Starlink has actually gotten slower as more people have joined the network. Starlink has launched thousands of satellites since it debuted, but in December 2023, users received 75/11Mbps on average — well below its speeds from two years earlier, even though it launched more than 3,000 additional satellites in the same period.
When I asked the Allenby, the senior director with the Maine Connectivity Authority, if he has concerns about Starlink reaching 100/20Mbps speeds, he told me that it hasn’t been an issue so far.
“We have a very granular level of reporting through the Starlink portal, and it has all been compliant,” Allenby says. “So we don’t have immediate concerns about that.”
It all comes down to capacity. Starlink’s user base has also grown rapidly over the past two years. It may be growing its pie, but there are also more people taking slices out of it. Starlink’s global user base grew from 2 million to 4 million in the past year alone.
“It’s like when you go to the airport and everybody’s on the Wi-Fi, so you can’t do anything. That’s the issue with capacity,” Conte says, noting that it would be a much bigger issue in Austin than the sparsely populated West Texas communities his office is looking to connect with LEO satellite internet.
Starlink is bullish that its speeds will start to pick up soon, even with all those new users. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell even predicted that speeds of 2 gigabits per second aren’t out of the question.
“The next generation will have smaller beams, more capacity per beam, lower latency,” Shotwell said at a conference in November. “What we’ll do is, instead of people having to have multiple dishes, we’ll just improve the satellite signal and the receive signal, and you’ll have gigabit, 2 gigabit per second speeds.”
In 2022, Musk also said in an interview that the new Starlink satellites will be “almost an order of magnitude more capable” than the current version — one in a long line of predictions Musk has made about imminent speed improvements, beginning with its initial application to the FCC in 2016, when SpaceX promised gigabit speeds for every user.
Whether that prediction comes true will largely depend on the success of its reusable Starship rockets, which can send bigger, next-generation Starlink satellites into orbit. SpaceX said in its 2024 Progress Report that “Each V3 Starlink satellite will have 1Tbps of downlink speeds and 160Gbps of uplink capacity, which is more than 10x the downlink and 24x the uplink capacity of the V2 Mini Starlink satellites.” The company said it plans to deploy 60 V3 satellites with each Starship launch — for a total of 60Tbps of downstream capacity — and dramatically increase its number of launches.
“Elon would say, next year he would love to have us have 25 missions a year, and in the next few years, 100,” Kathy Lueders, general manager of SpaceX’s Starbase operations, said in November during the Mexico Space Agency’s National Congress of Space Activities conference, according to Gizmodo. “He was telling me, ‘Kathy, I would love to launch a couple of times a day.'”
January Starship explosion casts new doubts
Musk was reportedly on track to get his wish for 25 launches this year — before a Starship rocket dramatically blew up as it was climbing into space on Jan. 16, raining debris over the Caribbean. The next day, the FAA suspended any additional Starship launches.
Musk didn’t seem overly concerned, writing on X that, “Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month.”
The space industry experts I spoke with weren’t quite so nonchalant, saying the explosion highlights the complications SpaceX faces as it tries to keep up with increasing demand.
“It’s kind of getting to the point where you guys have to get this figured out. You can’t have mistakes like this at this point,” says Todd Harrison, a former space industry executive at America Enterprise Institute.
In November, Starlink put customers on a waitlist in US cities like Seattle; Portland, Oregon; Sacramento; San Diego; and Austin, Texas, and added a one-time “congestion fee” of $100 for customers in high-usage areas. Walker, the Starlink user in Washington, told me that his town is now closed to new customers.
“People assumed that the new, bigger Starlink satellites will solve all of those problems, but they won’t, because they can’t launch them into the right orbits to cover those places,” says Tim Farrar, a satellite industry consultant. “That’s what the Starship is for, because the satellites are going to get much bigger.”
Last year, there were 145 rocket launches total in the US, compared with 21 launches five years ago. Of those 145, SpaceX accounted for a staggering 95%. That exponential increase has already posed issues on the ground and in the air.
Debris from the Starship explosion has been found around Turks and Caicos, and one piece reportedly struck a car. Local authorities were initially concerned about the presence of hydrazine, a propellant used on some spacecraft that can cause nausea, vomiting and nerve inflammation. SpaceX confirmed that Starship doesn’t use the fuel, but local authorities still advised residents not to touch any objects from the explosion.
“Even if it isn’t as dangerous as hydrazine, where you touch it or get close to it and you’re in trouble — it’s still volatile, like gasoline,” Marlon Sorge, the executive director of the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies at The Aerospace Corporation, told CNN. “And there are other things on board spacecraft, like batteries.”
The FAA also activated a Debris Response Area during the event, writing in a statement that it “briefly slowed aircraft outside the area where space vehicle debris was falling or stopped aircraft at their departure location.”
The event was a particularly violent reminder of the ways Starlink’s rapid expansion has disrupted everyday life. It wasn’t a one-off event, either. Two days before the Starship explosion, Australian airline Qantas said it had to delay several flights between Johannesburg and Sydney at the last minute due to debris from SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets.
“While we try to make any changes to our schedule in advance, the timing of recent launches have moved around at late notice which has meant we’ve had to delay some flights just prior to departure,” Qantas executive Ben Holland said in a statement.
Satellites in motion: “One maneuver every 5 minutes”
Once Starlink satellites are launched into orbit, they make countless adjustments to avoid hitting other objects in space. Lewis, the professor of astronautics at the University of Southampton, cited unpublished data in a conversation with CNET that SpaceX satellites made 100,050 maneuvers in the year ending in November 2024. That adds up to one maneuver every 5 minutes.
“Starlink’s done a pretty good job of controlling its satellites. We haven’t seen any collisions, and that was one of the things that people were worried about initially,” Farrar says.
But it’s a double-edged sword. SpaceX has done a good job of moving Starlink’s satellites to avoid collisions, but all those movements present their own complications. Lewis described 100,050 maneuvers as a “horrendously high number” — one that makes it more difficult for other operators to plan for.
“You don’t know where the satellites are going to be,” Lewis says. “The fact that they’re maneuvering all the time just degrades our awareness of where all the satellites are.”
Right now, about three in four objects in low-Earth orbit belong to Starlink, which means they’re mostly trying to navigate around each other. That becomes a lot more complicated when OneWeb, Amazon and other private companies launch their own megaconstellations. The Chinese company SpaceSail also plans to send around 14,000 satellites into low-Earth orbit.
Vishnu Reddy, a professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona, put it to me another way: “If everybody on the street is trying to avoid getting hit, eventually, we’re going to have accidents.”
SpaceX bases its maneuvers on probabilities. NASA’s guidance says that an avoidance maneuver should be performed if the chance of a collision is greater than one in 100,000. In July, SpaceX moved its threshold to one in 1 million.
“The only reason I could think of for SpaceX adjusting and putting their flag a bit lower down in that distribution was because they looked at that residual risk and said, ‘Yeah, that’s still too high. There are so many events happening that we can’t keep the constellation safe,'” Lewis says.
“It’s more than a million events a year, and that was on the basis of about 6,000 satellites. And when you figure out that they’re aiming for more than 30,000 satellites, then you’re probably thinking about several million events per year.”
That would result in Starlink’s satellites moving every 30 to 45 seconds, making the likelihood of a collision more of an inevitability than a likelihood.
Several of the space experts I spoke with mentioned the Kessler Syndrome, a hypothetical scenario in which debris in space sets off a chain reaction: one space object crashes into another, which creates more debris for objects to crash into. In a doomsday scenario, the Earth’s orbit could be so cluttered with space junk that satellites could no longer operate.
“That’s not happened in the past, because there were relatively few satellites in space,” Farrar says. “Obviously, that possibility is now increasing.”
That risk is increasing in some areas more than others. Starlink satellites are more densely clustered at higher latitudes, increasing the probability that debris from one collision would hit other Starlink satellites or spacecraft like the International Space Station, the Hubble telescope or the 27-satellite Global Positioning System.
Space junk is a problem here on Earth too. Last year, a piece of metal from a pallet of batteries dropped from the ISS landed on a home in Florida. Every year, between 200 and 400 human-built objects reenter through Earth’s atmosphere — a number that will inevitably increase with our cluttering skies. A 2022 study published in Nature Astronomy estimated that there’s a 10% chance that someone is killed by space debris over a decade. It also noted that this is a conservative estimate, “as the number of rocket launches is increasing quickly.”
“Nobody in any of these companies can tell me that there’s zero risk,” Lewis says. “When you do the math, I think that the risk is very high.”
And those are just the objects that we can see. Statistical models estimate that there are 1 million objects between 1 and 10 centimeters in orbit. These wouldn’t all cause fragmentation if they hit a satellite, but the sheer volume of space debris makes a collision an “almost certainty,” Lewis says. In fact, it may have already happened.
“It’s possible that the debris that’s going to cause the Kessler Syndrome is already there. Something has to initiate the scenario,” Reddy says. “The question is, when you say cascading, collisional scenarios, what is the time scale? Is it like the movie Gravity where it started and 3 hours later everything is gone? Or does it happen over months and years?”
The experts I spoke with weren’t sounding the alarm on a scenario like this just yet, but the staggering increase in the number of objects in space — and the projections to increase them in the future — mean we’re entering uncharted territory.
“I’m cautiously optimistic that we can pull this off as a space community,” Harrison says. “SpaceX has been incredibly responsible in how they’ve deployed Starlink.”
Warning signs for the ozone
For others, the more pressing issue is what happens to the satellites when they reach the end of their lives. Starlink’s satellites last around five years each. After that, they’re steered into the Earth’s atmosphere to burn up.
“To me, the collision risks are not probably the biggest area of concern,” Farrar says. “There are some environmental concerns about what might happen with all these satellites burning up.”
So far, we haven’t seen this play out at scale. Of the first group of Starlink satellites launched in 2019 and 2020, 337 out of 420 are still in orbit, according to data collected by Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist who tracks satellite launches. But SpaceX has recently started de-orbiting the first Starlink satellites at an increasingly high rate, “incinerating about 4 or 5 Starlinks every day at the moment,” McDowell tweeted in January.
Researchers have been ringing alarm bells about what could happen when thousands of Starlink satellites start being de-orbited each year.
“The worrying thing is that air sampling flights of the last couple years have found that, in one report, up to 10% of particle debris in the stratosphere has these weird melted pieces of metal that are suspiciously like pieces of melted spacecraft,” McDowell tells me. “We’re changing the composition of the stratosphere significantly.”
Those samples were taken in 2023 by scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Very few LEO satellites had burned up in the atmosphere at that point and scientists were already seeing the impact. They estimated that the percentage of particles in the stratosphere with traces of metals from rockets and satellites could increase from 10% to 50% “based on the number of satellites being launched into low-Earth orbit.”
According to the NOAA, the stratosphere is a layer of the Earth’s atmosphere that moderates Earth’s climate and includes the protective ozone layer.
One study, funded by NASA and published in June in Geophysical Research Letters, found that a 550-pound satellite releases about 66 pounds of aluminum oxide nanoparticles during reentry. These oxides have increased eightfold from 2016 to 2022. The bigger satellites that will be deployed by the Starship rocket will weigh in at around 2,750 pounds each.
“This is primarily a concern for the large number of satellites to be launched in the future,” says Joseph Wang, one of the study’s authors. “We projected a yearly excess of more than 640% over the natural level [of aluminum oxide nanoparticles]. Based on that projection, we are very worried.”
According to the EPA, ozone depletion leads to health issues like skin cancer, cataracts and weakened immune systems, as well as reduced crop yield and disruptions in the marine food chain.
We’re not seeing those effects yet, but in a world where “100,000 satellites in the sky by 2030 is not just feasible but quite likely,” the research certainly seems alarming. But the scientists I spoke with described this as more of a “wait and see” situation.
“Adding many tons of aluminum per day to the atmosphere could certainly affect the ozone layer. Right now, the research is not in,” McDowell says. “It’s possible the answer will be, ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a few orders of magnitude to spare. This is not going to do anything bad.’ It is also possible that the research will come back and say, ‘Yeah, we’re really destroying the ozone.'”
Astronomy interference: “More satellites than stars visible”
When SpaceX launched the first Starlink satellites in 2019, its own engineers were shocked at how bright they were. Astronomical images were suddenly getting photobombed by Starlink.
“What surprised everyone — the astronomy community and SpaceX — was how bright their satellites are,” Patrick Seitzer, an astronomy professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, said at a conference eight months after the first Starlink launch.
SpaceX has since implemented a host of brightness mitigation best practices like using less reflective materials and shifting satellites away from the sun when crossing the terminator (the line on Earth’s surface separating night and day).
The astronomers I spoke with said these techniques have largely been effective.
“There’s definitely a lowering of so-called brightness due to the mitigation effects they’ve taken,” Reddy says.
But like with the space debris and environmental concerns, the increasing number of satellites in the sky has astronomers worried. And while SpaceX has been responsive to their concerns, there’s no guarantee that other companies and governments will be too.
“Starlink is not the worst, because they’re in these low orbits, and they are trying to be dark,” McDowell says. “It’s less of a problem than the satellites in orbits that are twice as high where they are shiny at midnight and visible over a much wider area. In particular, the new Chinese constellations that are just starting to deploy are much more of a threat to astronomy than Starlink.”
The implications are wide-ranging. Early research on climate change came from studying the atmosphere of Venus, and technologies like radar and nuclear fusion were borne out of astronomy.
It’s also an enormous bummer for the stargazers among us. McDowell described a scenario to me where there could be more satellites than stars visible in the sky, the human-made constellation blending into the cosmos.
“The whole background of the night sky might sort of start to shimmer,” he says.
“It’s just a dot”
In 2012, the now-deceased Congressman John Lewis said that “access to the internet is the civil rights issue of the 21st century.” Whatever your thoughts are about Musk, Starlink’s divisive architect, there’s no denying that the service has contributed positively to that issue.
Hall, the director of the nonprofit in eastern Kentucky, described the scene at a rural home in the moments after a family activated their Starlink service for the first time.
“If you could have seen how their grandkid sprinted inside and turned on his laptop, his Xbox. He turned on every piece of equipment he had. And it all worked,” Hall says. “That’s a big deal. These are folks that have grown multiple generations in eastern Kentucky. These people aren’t going anywhere. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have access to this technology.”
But there is a cost for scenes like this — a cost that’s accumulating invisibly to most of us thousands of miles up in the air.
“It’s a very difficult problem to communicate to the general public,” says Reddy, the professor at the University of Arizona. “It’s not like an oil spill, where the pelicans are dying. It’s not visceral. There’s debris you can show them through a telescope. But it’s just a dot.”
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