\n<\/p>\n
SpaceX, after launching 10,000 satellites into orbit, aims to loft one million more in a plan that space powers around the world will likely oppose. Shown here is a simulated image released by the European Space Agency of 12,000 space objects now circling the globe. (Photo by ESA\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/span><\/p>\n ESA\/AFP via Getty Images<\/small><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n While Elon Musk stunned the world with plans to launch a million satellites into orbit, the heads of space agencies and spacecraft operators across the planet are certain to oppose this SpaceX scheme, says a pre-eminent space scholar.<\/p>\n If the American Federal Aviation Administration even hinted it might approve the lift-off of a million-strong SpaceX mega-constellation, \u201cI would expect immediate and very strong objections from satellite operators, astronomers, insurers, national space agencies, defense organizations, and foreign governments,\u201d says Brian Hurley, a world-leading expert who chronicles the rapid-fire expansion of the modern space sector, and its rippling effects across the spheres of national security and international affairs.<\/p>\n \u201cThe objections would not only come from China and Russia,\u201d says Hurley, founder of the influential think tank New Space Economy, which also publishes a digital magazine. <\/p>\n \u201cThey would likely come from U.S. and European operators too, because the risk is not contained inside the company proposing the system.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cPutting one million satellites into orbit would sharply increase the potential for inter-satellite collisions,\u201d Hurley told me in an interview. <\/p>\n SpaceX has already created the greatest constellation ever around this planet, and hopes to speed myriad more satellites into orbit. (Photo by: Alan Dyer\/VW Pics\/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)<\/span><\/p>\n VW Pics\/Universal Images Group via Getty Images<\/small><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n \u201cAt one-million-satellite scale, even tiny failure percentages become large absolute numbers. A 99.9% success rate still leaves 1,000 failed satellites.\u201d<\/p>\n Failed satellites that have lost their ability to maneuver to avoid collisions could careen into other nearby satellites, potentially triggering a cascade of smash-ups.<\/p>\n If launched above the high-traffic rings of low Earth orbit, Hurley says, \u201cA million satellites in higher, longer-lived orbits would be much more dangerous because failed spacecraft and debris could remain there for decades or centuries.\u201d<\/p>\n The potential for out-of-control satellites rises, he adds, in the face of \u201csolar storms, software failures, propulsion failures, bad ephemeris data, cyber issues, manufacturing defects, launch deployment anomalies, and ordinary aging.\u201d<\/p>\n In advance of SpaceX making an initial public offering of shares, its founder posted a bombshell message on the SpaceX Updates website sketching out blueprints on “launching a constellation of a million satellites,\u201d a plan that Elon Musk pledged would ultimately push forward \u201chumanity\u2019s multi-planetary future.\u201d<\/p>\n The post by the planet\u2019s richest aerospace aristocrat triggered space-sector shockwaves that criss-crossed the continents. <\/p>\n SpaceX aims to use its Starship super-capsule, which is now being tested, to speed a super-constellation into orbit. (Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/span><\/p>\n AFP via Getty Images<\/small><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n Surrounding the globe in a supermassive cloud of satellites, space scholar Brian Hurley says, \u201cwould make failed spacecraft a much larger long-term hazard.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf one operator fills a shell with a million satellites, every other operator using nearby or crossing orbits inherits part of that risk.\u201d<\/p>\n Even the prospect of rocketing so many satellites to circle the Earth, and possibly endangering other spacecraft, could trigger a political tornado that spins across the globe. <\/p>\n \u201cSpaceX,\u201d he says, \u201cwould receive the business upside, but the collision risk, sky-brightness problem, radio-frequency coordination problem, reentry burden, and long-term debris risk would be shared by everyone.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cThat is exactly the kind of situation that produces international objections.\u201d<\/p>\n Hurley says there are already portents of future protests against SpaceX\u2019s plan, sparked by its lofting just 10,000 Starlink satellites so far into low Earth orbit.<\/p>\n \u201cAstronomers and scientific institutions have objected to very large satellite and orbital infrastructure proposals,” he says, “and previous Starlink approvals have already been challenged in court by other parties.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cA one-million-satellite proposal would multiply that reaction dramatically.\u201d<\/p>\n Leading-edge sensor technologies, ranging from radars to telescopes and high-resolution space-based cameras, are now deployed by the American government and NewSpace leaders to track the human space capsules, space stations, satellites and shrapnel created in earlier collisions that are speeding around the planet at 28,000 kilometers per hour.<\/p>\n \u201cLeoLabs, the U.S. Space Force, Space-Track, and the emerging NOAA\/Commerce TraCSS system already provide tracking, conjunction assessments [on potential upcoming collisions], and warning services,\u201d Hurley told me. <\/p>\n \u201cLeoLabs says its radar network tracks more than 22,000 satellites, rocket bodies, and debris fragments for conjunction alerts.\u201d <\/p>\n The U.S. Space Force\u2019s 18th Space Defense Squadron tracks the myriad rings of active and out-of-control satellites, and speeds its findings on imminent collisions to spacecraft operators that can direct avoidance maneuvers.<\/p>\n But expanding and upgrading these tracking systems to survey a million spacecraft would require an astronomical leap in capabilities.<\/p>\n At the same time, Hurley points out, \u201ctracking is only the first layer.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe harder question is whether the system can maintain accurate orbit knowledge, process enormous numbers of possible conjunctions, distribute timely warnings, receive updated maneuver plans from operators, deconflict those maneuvers, and do all of that when satellites fail, operators disagree, data is incomplete, or geopolitical relationships are bad.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cCurrent systems,\u201d he says, \u201cwere not designed around a million maneuvering objects, plus debris, plus dead spacecraft, plus adversarial or non-cooperative behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSome national space agencies and commercial partners are only now beginning to demonstrate technologies for inspecting, capturing, and deorbiting defunct satellites or spent rocket stages, while other operators have continued to leave dead spacecraft and upper stages in orbit.\u201d <\/p>\n Darren McKnight<\/u><\/a>, Senior Technical Fellow at the world-leading orbital mapping outfit LeoLabs, says it would be difficult to predict how long it could take to expand LeoLabs\u2019 space surveillance system to track more than a million spacecraft whizzing through the orbital rings encircling the Earth. <\/p>\n One of the planet\u2019s foremost spacecraft trackers, Dr. McKnight told me in an interview: \u201cWe are built to scale quickly and have scaled quickly enough to handle all of the shock to the system over the last few years where the number of operational satellites increased by five times.\u201d <\/p>\n McKnight, who holds a doctorate in aerospace engineering from the prestigious University of Colorado and has written a torrent of breakthrough papers on space debris and its potential to trigger catastrophic collisions<\/u><\/a>, says he seriously doubts \u201cthere will ever be a million operational satellites in LEO.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf there were,\u201d he forecast, \u201cit would be a gradual process to get to that point.” <\/p>\n \u201cOver time, spacecraft reliability would slowly be eroded while the operational burden to mitigate collision risk would likely grow at an exponential rate (i.e., a squared effect versus a linear rate).\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cOther technologies would evolve along with this increased risk, along with us installing more radars to continue to provide responsive conjunction assessments.\u201d<\/p>\n McKnight heads the data analytics team at the Silicon Valley-based LeoLabs, which operates a global web of phased array radars<\/u><\/a> that scan low Earth orbit while charting tens of thousands objects in flight – from abandoned rockets to the clouds of shrapnel created by anti-satellite missile tests – that circumnavigate the globe.<\/p>\n LeoLabs combines cutting-edge radar imagery with predictive AI tools to model approaching orbital threats, and notifies satellite operators and other space players of high-probability smash-ups waiting in the wings.<\/p>\n Yet Dr. McKnight says the greatest threat to the space sector planet-wide right now is the spent rocket stages that have been jettisoned into \u201clong-lived orbits.\u201d<\/p>\n A smash-up between any two of these phantom spacecraft, he says, could ultimately spark a cascade of collisions. <\/p>\n He says the three space superpowers account for the overwhelming majority of massive derelict spacecraft that now threaten the future of human and robotic space exploration.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the last two years, China has abandoned 37 rocket bodies amounting to 156,000 kg in orbits above 650 kilometers,\u201d he says. \u201cThese will stay in orbit for decades to centuries.\u201d<\/p>\n