Speaker 1: Ten nine eight, Elon, Musk and SpaceX have already launched
Speaker 1: thousands of satellites into space two.
Speaker 2: One ignition engine, full power liftof Go, SpaceX Ghost Starlink.
Speaker 1: Fucking now, I believe you, my Valentine. Now they want
Speaker 1: to launch more, way, more, up to one million satellites
Speaker 1: as part of a proposal to power massive data centers
Speaker 1: in space. They pitch it as a clean, green alternative
Speaker 1: to regular data centers. But as our Earth's orbit becomes
Speaker 1: increasingly crowded, what will Elon's Mega constellation due to our
Speaker 1: night sky? And could a crash between satellites set off
Speaker 1: a catastrophic chain reaction. I'm Daniel James, and you're listening
Speaker 1: to seven Am today Associate Professor of Astronomy Sam Lawler
Speaker 1: on the potential for disaster, the need for new space laws,
Speaker 1: and the time a huge piece of spice junk landed
Speaker 1: in a hometown. It's Monday, February twenty three, Sam, thanks
Speaker 1: for joining us. Can you start off by telling us
Speaker 1: about this mega constallations that Alon Musk, can the spice
Speaker 1: mites at spicix want to build an orbit? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Well, so there already are mega constellations in orbit. Starlink
Speaker 3: is the first and the biggest. There are almost ten
Speaker 3: thousand Starlink satellites in orbit today above our heads, and
Speaker 3: they've launched more than eleven thousand right, so more than
Speaker 3: a thousand have burned up already in the atmosphere. These
Speaker 3: satellites are built in large batches, they're launched in large batches.
Speaker 3: It's a very different way of operating satellites than we've
Speaker 3: seen previously. They don't have very long operating lifetimes before
Speaker 3: they burned them up in the atmosphere. But SpaceX has
Speaker 3: plans to launch a million satellites right, which is many
Speaker 3: orders of magnitude more satellites than are currently in orbit.
Speaker 1: So Maaski is also talking about putting data centers in
Speaker 1: space ording the Earth.
Speaker 4: I think the case it's a no brainer for building
Speaker 4: AI SOL powered AI data centers in space because as mentioned,
Speaker 4: it's also very cold in space.
Speaker 1: Spicce X is pitching this is a cost effective and
Speaker 1: grainer alternative to traditional data centers because you don't need
Speaker 1: the same amount of power and wanted to cool them
Speaker 1: out in space.
Speaker 4: It's a very efficient cooling system. So net effect is
Speaker 4: that the lowest cost place to put AI will be
Speaker 4: space and that'll be true within two years, maybe three.
Speaker 1: Three of the latest is that something that's viable, is
Speaker 1: that something that will actually work.
Speaker 3: That is something that is completely untested. Right, No one
Speaker 3: has shown that a data centered my operation can work
Speaker 3: in orbit. I'm not an engineer, but it's my understanding
Speaker 3: that it's actually really really hard to dissipate heat in orbit.
Speaker 3: In outer space, there's no air to conduct the heat
Speaker 3: away from your satellite, so it's actually really easy for
Speaker 3: a satellite to burn up and fry itself.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: This actually did happen with one of the first Starlink
Speaker 3: satellites that they tried to make darker so it was
Speaker 3: better for astronomy. They painted it black and it overheated
Speaker 3: and fried. So this should be a problem that SpaceX
Speaker 3: is familiar with. But as for greener, well, it's greener
Speaker 3: if you ignore all of the emissions associated with launching
Speaker 3: that many satellites into orbit and then disposing of them
Speaker 3: at the end of their lives. Right now, everything in
Speaker 3: lower orbit, the end of life plan is to burn
Speaker 3: it up in Earth's atmosphere, and that doesn't go away, right,
Speaker 3: all the computer parts and it's panels and plastic and
Speaker 3: metal that all gets deposited in Earth's upper atmosphere. And
Speaker 3: these are these are large satellites right the data center satellites.
Speaker 3: I'm not exactly sure how big they'll be, but Starlink
Speaker 3: satellites that they're launching now are a thousand kilograms right there.
Speaker 3: They're big satellites. They're they're like a Ford Ranger with
Speaker 3: thirty meters solar panels. They're they're not small. So yeah,
Speaker 3: thinking about a million satellites burning those up in the atmosphere,
Speaker 3: it's catastrophic, right, And if they don't burn up completely,
Speaker 3: pieces hit the ground and and that's a huge problem too,
Speaker 3: which I've I've witnessed at my home in Saskatchewan, Canada.
Speaker 1: You've got to be dreaming of injecting food avenges in
Speaker 1: the spice now, Sam so I thanks for that, SOT,
Speaker 1: I'm sure tell us about what happened me youohimtown.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, so near near where I live, a SpaceX
Speaker 3: Crew Dragon trunk, big pieces of it landed on farmland.
Speaker 3: So this also happened in Australia in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 3: The very first Crew Dragon trunk dropped very large pieces
Speaker 3: onto farmland. It was the same situation, right, farmers found
Speaker 3: these giant pieces, got in contact with an astronomer.
Speaker 2: And so we think this is a fin. This is
Speaker 2: a part of the fin of the trunk that has
Speaker 2: now speared itself into the ground, and it's about three
Speaker 2: meters tall. We think of ways about twenty to thirty kilograms.
Speaker 2: Obviously we haven't dug it out of the ground, and then.
Speaker 3: Had to figure out how do you deal with pieces
Speaker 3: of foreign countries spacecraft on your farm? Right, this is
Speaker 3: a weird situation. The rules are vague, and we're written
Speaker 3: decades ago, and it's a situation that's going to become
Speaker 3: more and more common as more and more stuff goes
Speaker 3: into orbit and then falls back down to Earth.
Speaker 1: One are the environmental impacts that they said lots launching
Speaker 1: in the spice in the data centers, and how much
Speaker 1: fuel does it tight to get one of those things
Speaker 1: up there?
Speaker 3: Oh, that's a really good question, and I don't have
Speaker 3: those numbers at the top of my head. I know
Speaker 3: that each rocket launch is you know, it's a lot
Speaker 3: of pollution, right, but it's more the aggregate effects of
Speaker 3: many many launches. Right now, we're at about a launch
Speaker 3: per day on average somewhere in the world. And even
Speaker 3: water vapor as an exhaust product from rockets when it's
Speaker 3: deposited in very dry layers of the upper atmosphere, that
Speaker 3: can have serious effects on chemistry and temperature. Adding things
Speaker 3: like black carbon, which is a common emission product that's
Speaker 3: really bad that changes temperatures dramatically. There's indications that it
Speaker 3: could cause ozone depletion because chemical reactions proceed differently, but
Speaker 3: it's really not very well studied. There's not a lot
Speaker 3: of funding to study this, even though it's happening more
Speaker 3: and more commonly. And then, yeah, the end of life
Speaker 3: pollution I also mentioned, right, so all of that needs
Speaker 3: to be taken into account. And then there's also a
Speaker 3: pollution in orbit too, right, Like, there's there's great risks
Speaker 3: for collisions with active satellites. If you want to count
Speaker 3: that as pollution, I think I think it should count
Speaker 3: as pollution. So yeah, so there's.
Speaker 1: Going to be a lot of these things in orbit.
Speaker 1: It seems that to power these data sent as this
Speaker 1: spaking go off, unite up to a million satellites. It
Speaker 1: seems like quite a bit, well, yeah, quite a bit.
Speaker 1: What would be the impact of that, especially considering half credit.
Speaker 1: It's already getting up there, like you said.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so okay, So I originally started worrying about satellites
Speaker 3: in orbit because I could see them in my sky,
Speaker 3: right And I'm sure many of your listeners, probably all
Speaker 3: of your listeners have seen satellites in the sky now, right, Like,
Speaker 3: it's not an uncommon thing. Anytime you go outside, within
Speaker 3: a couple hours of sunriser sunset, you can see satellites.
Speaker 3: And this was causing more and more problems for my
Speaker 3: astronomy research, right, So yeah, I started looking at what
Speaker 3: would a million data centers in orbit look like, right,
Speaker 3: And it's thousands of naked eye visible satellites would be
Speaker 3: in your sky, crawling in grids across the sky, right. So,
Speaker 3: just thinking about how much that would change the night
Speaker 3: sky worldwide is pretty horrifying. But then, yeah, all the
Speaker 3: environmental effects the collision risks in orbit are also huge.
Speaker 3: My collaborators and I have looked at how unsafe orbit
Speaker 3: is currently right now. Starlink, for example, they do a
Speaker 3: collision avoidance maneuver once every two minutes in order to
Speaker 3: not crash into themselves and into other pieces of debris.
Speaker 3: And other satellites that are up there, right, So what
Speaker 3: would that look like with a million satellites? How often
Speaker 3: would they have to maneuver to avoid collisions? With a
Speaker 3: million satellites, that's quite frequent.
Speaker 1: Because you spak, you speak about something called the Kessels
Speaker 1: seed drive. Is that what you're thinking about?
Speaker 2: He yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: So if we lost the ability to do collision avoidance maneuvers,
Speaker 3: my collaborators and I calculate that it'll be about three
Speaker 3: and a half days before we have a collision, right,
Speaker 3: So that's how much time we have. If everything goes
Speaker 3: wrong and they stop being able to do these maneuvers,
Speaker 3: that's not very much time to recover. So if there's
Speaker 3: a collision, you get a bunch of debris that will
Speaker 3: cause more collisions and make more debris. Right, So this
Speaker 3: runaway effect can destroy a lot of satellites very quickly.
Speaker 3: And some experts say that we're already in Kessler syndrome.
Speaker 3: Is just the timescale between collisions is very long right now,
Speaker 3: and we don't want it to get shorter. Right, the
Speaker 3: first time we have a collision, there will be more debris,
Speaker 3: and the timescale gets shorter and shorter and shorter.
Speaker 1: Coming up. Why Spice is the wild wist when it
Speaker 1: comes to rules and regulation, sam one are the rules
Speaker 1: when it comes to launching these mega satellites. Can anyone
Speaker 1: launch a set a lot?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you just have to get permission from the
Speaker 3: government of the country where you're launching from. So for SpaceX,
Speaker 3: they have to get permission from the US government, and
Speaker 3: the federal agency that's in charge of this is actually
Speaker 3: set up to regulate radio broadcasts, right, They're not really
Speaker 3: set up to look at orbital safety and all of
Speaker 3: the problems associated with satellites. So they just have to
Speaker 3: get permission from the US FCC. And there's actually a
Speaker 3: comment period open now to the general public. It's it's
Speaker 3: very complicated to submit a comment, but anyone can do it.
Speaker 3: And this is the only time that people in the
Speaker 3: general public anywhere in the world can object to SpaceX
Speaker 3: launching a million satellites into orbit. There are a couple
Speaker 3: of dark Sky International has really great instructions for how
Speaker 3: to submit a comment, but this is the only chance
Speaker 3: to actually formally protest it.
Speaker 1: Have five D on the track. We in a regulatory
Speaker 1: sense and in a permission sense from Moscow actually being
Speaker 1: able to launch these satellites, these million satelltes.
Speaker 3: So the comment period is open. Once the comment period closes,
Speaker 3: presumably the FCC reviews these comments and then they can
Speaker 3: grant permission for them to start launching.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: That's that's all it takes. So it could be weeks,
Speaker 3: maybe even less before the comment period closes on March.
Speaker 3: It's either March sixth or March ninth, I don't remember
Speaker 3: which date, but it's very soon. And the FCC in
Speaker 3: the US has been going faster and faster with these
Speaker 3: approvals lately, so it could be very very quick. They
Speaker 3: don't have like nobody's ever built a data center satellite before,
Speaker 3: so like I don't I don't know how quickly they
Speaker 3: would actually start launching, but it makes me really really
Speaker 3: sad how quickly this can all happen with very little
Speaker 3: input from anybody and no environmental oversight at all none.
Speaker 1: So what conum regulation would you love to say? And
Speaker 1: how would that work?
Speaker 3: I'd like to see us look at the total effects
Speaker 3: of this, right, because like there are good effects, right,
Speaker 3: like starlink. Internet is incredibly useful, lots of people use it.
Speaker 3: I live in a rural place. I know lots of
Speaker 3: people who use starlink because rural internet is terrible. Right,
Speaker 3: I'm sure a lot of people in Australia also use it, right,
Speaker 3: So yeah, I would like to see a balancing of
Speaker 3: the good and the bad, right, Like, yes, it's really
Speaker 3: nice to have this good, fast internet, but what are
Speaker 3: the costs? How could we make this less costly in
Speaker 3: terms of environmental effects and astronomy effects and collision risks
Speaker 3: and casualty risks on the ground, right, And one way
Speaker 3: we could do that very easily is if SpaceX and
Speaker 3: other companies focused on how to deliver their services with
Speaker 3: fewer satellites. That would help with all of the problems
Speaker 3: that I've talked about. And that's an engineering challenge, right, Like,
Speaker 3: that is an engineering challenge I'm presenting right now to SpaceX, Right,
Speaker 3: how do you deliver your services with fewer satellites? Because yeah,
Speaker 3: that is the big challenge to everything.
Speaker 1: Right now, what's the worst Cauist scenario if we don't
Speaker 1: create some rules around what happens to spice? What do
Speaker 1: you worry about the most, Sam.
Speaker 3: I worry a lot about the atmospheric pollution. I really
Speaker 3: don't think we can have a million satellites in orbit
Speaker 3: without serious crashes, right, I think that we would be
Speaker 3: in Kessler syndrome long before we could get to a
Speaker 3: million satellites. So I don't think we can actually do this, right,
Speaker 3: I don't think that our safety rules around collision avoidance maneuvers,
Speaker 3: and we don't know where all the debris is, right,
Speaker 3: we can't see all of it. So I really don't
Speaker 3: think that we can actually get to a million. But
Speaker 3: I don't want us to go into Kessler syndrome just
Speaker 3: trying to do that for no good reason.
Speaker 1: If Kessler seen drive did happen in Sam, would effect
Speaker 1: Papal's ability to listen to seven I.
Speaker 3: Am, Yeah, possibly people who rely on satellite internet. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: you would not be able to use that anymore. One
Speaker 3: of the densest part of orbit is Starlank's orbit, so
Speaker 3: that is where it's most likely to have a major collision.
Speaker 1: Well, this is worse than I even thought. Sam. Sorry,
Speaker 1: thank you, thank you so much for coming on and
Speaker 1: speaking with us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks thanks for having me. And like, do you
Speaker 3: do get out and enjoy your night skies?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 3: Like there is a time of night when you can
Speaker 3: see no sunlit satellites and the skies are still beautiful
Speaker 3: up there.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. Also in the news, Australian businesses
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