how to endanger the future of space flight for status and profit
CEOs and space faring powers are treating low Earth orbit as their personal playgrounds, much to the horror of space agencies.
When the web stopped being about creating a global library of knowledge and useful tools, and became a contest of how many users you can sign up for your social media platform or show ads to, companies like Facebook and Google hit a massive snag. You see, in 2010, there were only 2 billion internet users across the world despite the global population just exceeding 7 billion people. And so, they decided that it was their mission to bring the web to the remaining 5 billion by any means necessary.
Google started Project Loon, trying to deliver web access via high altitude balloons used in meteorology and climate research. Facebook tried a whole bunch of ideas to expand access, and even tried building a satellite to bring remote and impoverished regions of sub-Saharan Africa online. Of course, we already know that these projects failed and the only satellite internet game in orbit right now is Starlink.
I say right now because Chinese telecom companies, Amazon, and potentially even a few European startups are looking to launch their own satellite constellations. which is a bit of a problem. You see, satellites are very small and move very quickly, especially in low Earth orbit. If you want to have uninterrupted internet connections, you need to constantly have an orbital device over the horizon.
"you will be connected, do not resist"
That means each service needs tens of thousands of objects in orbit at all times to both provide access and handle the load of billions of concurrent connections. At the same time, Earth's orbit is large, but not infinite, and these satellites will still experience drag from the outer filaments of our atmosphere, so their orbits will decay, and they need plenty of room to maneuver to avoid each other and not create a catastrophic cascade of collisions that could trap us on Earth for up to a century as enough the debris falls back to the planet.
There's even a name for this theoretical crisis: Kessler Syndrome, named after NASA engineer Donald Kessler who voiced this concern. If we turn our orbit into a giant high speed garbage dump, which we've been doing quite a bit, keep doing an absolutely abominable job of cleaning up after ourselves, and launch the planned 42,000 Starlink satellites, 200,000 Qianfan and Guowang sats, 10,000 Amazon Leo devices, and another 290 anchors for Europe's IRIS² cubes, low Earth orbit will become so crowded that a few bad bumps or a stray meteorite will enshroud the planet in metal shards traveling seven times faster than a bullet from a sniper rifle.
And this is not to mention the effect that over a quarter million satellites will have on scientific uses of space, astronomy, space exploration, and cosmology, all so a handful of organizations can use space as a phallus measuring contest of who can launch more solar powered routers into the vacuum of space. This is why the ESA recently issued a scathing report warning of a Kessler cascade and the sabotage of countless important research projects as a direct consequence of this competition, calling for someone to finally step in and do some actual regulation.
from final frontier to floating landfill
Oddly enough, their biggest worry wasn't even runaway space internet, but the plan to launch thousands of mirrors to reflect sunlight, creating patches of extended daytime and disrupting not only astronomy but circadian rhythms, and potentially frying other satellites in the process because if we're going to treat space like the Wild West, why not just let every impulsive thought from a poorly thought out retro sci-fi comic book win?
In all seriousness though, in this attempted revival of ultra-nationalist fervor to soothe the nerves of people scared of the future and disgusted by the idea of working together to make the world a better place, it may seem like an arms race that ruins everything is inevitable. But it's not.
No matter how hard we try to pretend otherwise, our flags and borders are not magic shields from responsibility and consequences. We still live on one fairly small planet in a very large universe, and our actions will affect each other no matter how many lines we draw on maps or insignias we put on our machines, and refusing to accept that is a very deliberate choice. We do not need to treat our own sky as yet another place to pollute, exploit, and mistreat on a whim just because space is airless and radioactive.
Our orbit is a shared resource, just like our seas, and what we allow to happen above our heads is just as important as what we allow to happen in our oceans. And if we fail to come up with a sane framework that yes, involves telling power hungry and status obsessed politicians and narcissistic rich duded no, firmly and actually meaning it, we're going to feel the brunt of the consequences whether we like it or not.
