Experts warn that SpaceX’s 1 million satellites will create a junkyard in space

SpaceX’s dream of creating a million data centers in space is closer to reality than science fiction.

On May 29 the company I made the deposit To the FCC, which answered questions about its plan. Ten days later, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk sat down for a session Video interview He posted on his social media platform, X, to provide more details.

“Space is really big,” Musk said. “It doesn’t look like space is going to be crowded.” “These satellites are so small that you can’t even see them. They are very, very small compared to Earth.”

Putting data centers in space would solve two of the biggest problems facing AI companies in the United States today: 7 out of every 10 Americans They don’t want to build data centers where they live, and these centers use a An amazing amount Of electricity and water.

But while Musk likes to remind people that there’s a lot of space in space, scientists have already raised alarms about it Risks of overcrowding In our current satellite ecosystem: Ozone depletion From an unsustainably large number of maneuvers to debris from satellites falling to Earth. What happens if we go from our current 15,000 satellites to 1 million?

Since SpaceX announced its plan in January, space industry experts I’ve spoken with have generally scoffed at the absurdity of that number. “I have a very hard time seeing, but I’m very surprised they’ve reached 10,000 now,” Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist who tracks satellite launches, told me. “Historically, the bet on SpaceX changing the way space is done has not been a good one.”

Recently, new details have emerged about what is actually happening. In recent interviews, I’ve noticed a clear shift from disbelief to genuine concern.

“This orbital altitude is not in great shape, and it wasn’t in great shape two decades ago,” Hugh Lewis, professor of astronautics at the University of Birmingham, said of the half a million satellites planned to have a range of between 900 and 1,000 kilometres. “It won’t end well.”

It’s probably no coincidence that SpaceX is bringing up the data center in space conversations right now, too. The company’s initial public offering on June 12 is expected to be the largest IPO in history, which will make Musk the world’s first trillionaire. Currently represents AI-related stocks Nearly half Market capitalization of the Standard & Poor’s 500 index.

The timing of this IPO helped explain the tight sentiment around SpaceX’s filing with the FCC, said Hanno Ren, an astrophysicist at the University of Toronto.

“A lot of the numbers are a bit random and unclear,” Ren told me. “It’s hard to separate how much of this we should take seriously and how much of it is just an IPO announcement.”

I reached out to a SpaceX representative for comment and did not receive a response.

Bigger satellites, and lots of them

Whether you take Musk at his word or with a heavy dose of salt, it’s hard to overstate the sheer scale of SpaceX’s data center ambitions.

The data center satellites – dubbed AI1 in Musk’s interview – will be 70 meters long and 20 meters high, with a total area of ​​1,400 square metres. That’s roughly the size of an NHL hockey rink and far exceeds the 800-square-meter space SpaceX described in its FCC filing just 10 days ago.

The AI1 satellites will be about 12 times larger than the most common Starlink satellites in the sky today. A million of them will occupy a space that is difficult to imagine.

“It’s about 1% of the size of New Jersey,” Wren said. “If someone proposed this on Earth, there would be all kinds of logistical challenges. In space, everything is much more complicated.”

These massive solar arrays would occupy the same space in low Earth orbit as the more than 15,600 satellites active in that region today. SpaceX says more than 500,000 of them will live at an altitude between 946 and 1,002 kilometers, an altitude that has been troubling scientists for decades.

This is because objects at this height tend to collide with each other. In 2006, NASA decided And space debris will continue to increase over the next 200 years, even without any new launches. This was “primarily driven by high collision activity” occurring at a distance of between 900 and 1,000 kilometers, which is where SpaceX plans to put up to half of its orbital data centers.

This altitude is a death trap for satellites because atmospheric drag is so low. This means that it is not natural for debris to be drawn into Earth’s atmosphere to burn up.

“It’s kind of the worst hike for a lot of things,” McDowell said. “If a satellite goes down, it probably won’t reenter for hundreds of years.”

Why is SpaceX putting so many satellites in this high-risk area? It’s basically the same reason debris sticks around for centuries: low atmospheric drag. Because AI1’s solar panels are so large, it will have a lot of drag at low altitudes. Basically, they need to bypass the outer atmosphere to overcome it.

It also puts them at much greater risk of contributing to a so-called doomsday event Kessler syndromea feedback loop where a single collision creates thousands of pieces of debris that may lead to more collisions. In a worst-case scenario, this would make space unsuitable for both satellites and space travel.

Satellite graves in space

Other key details revealed in SpaceX’s FCC filing are its new methods for disposing of its AI1 satellites. In an attempt to alleviate some of these overcrowding issues, the FCC began mandating them In 2022 The satellites deorbit after five years in the sky, a significant decline from the previous rule of 25 years.

But what to do with these satellites after their five years are up has raised more problems. SpaceX is currently working to lower the altitude of its satellites so that they burn up in the atmosphere. Only about a thousand satellites have been de-orbited by Starlink so far, but each one adds significant amounts of aluminum and lithium aerosols to the atmosphere, potentially eroding the ozone layer and potentially accelerating climate change.

One study A NASA-funded study published in Geophysical Research Letters in mid-2024 found that a 550-pound satellite releases about 66 pounds of aluminum oxide nanoparticles when deorbited. The presence of these nanoparticles increased eightfold from 2016 to 2022, when there were still relatively few satellites deorbiting. SpaceX says its new data center satellites will weigh about 6,600 pounds, compared to 1,760 pounds for the V2 satellites.

This seems to be the ripple effect that most impacts the scientists I spoke with, so I was interested to learn that SpaceX is looking to move away from atmospheric re-entry for its AI1 satellites above 600 kilometers. At these altitudes, the company is asking the FCC to allow it to refer satellites to “gear-free or heliocentric orbits.”

“Earth disposal orbits” basically mean anything outside low Earth orbit, which stops at about 2,000 kilometers. It’s an open question where exactly SpaceX will send these defunct data centers, but just because they’re outside low Earth orbit doesn’t mean they’ve stopped posing a risk.

“If they were just proposing a constellation of 100 satellites to put in that area, I would say, ‘Yes, well, that’s probably good,'” McDowell said. “But a million? That would be a very dangerous ring around the Earth of dead things that would be a traffic hazard.”

McDowell and Lewis both brought up the 2008 Disney animated film Wall-E when I asked them about these graveyard orbits, where Earth becomes surrounded by a dense field of space debris and space junk.

“If you think about a million satellites, each with a lifespan of five years, on average, 200,000 satellites a year will retire,” Lewis said. “They will collide, and the fragments will be ejected back into low Earth orbit.”

He also said: “There will be a cloud around the Earth made up of what in five years will be a million satellites, and in another five years I will add another million.” “And you keep doing that as long as you manage the constellation.”

SpaceX also mentioned “solar heliocentric orbits” as another way to decommission satellites, which would send older satellites beyond Earth’s gravity and into orbit around the sun. While this would take care of space debris and ozone concerns, it would also be more technically difficult.

These orbital data centers will live between 550 and 1,000 kilometers from Earth. To escape Earth’s gravity, they would have to travel beyond geostationary satellites at an altitude of 36,000 km. Lewis says that would require either huge amounts of fuel or years of time, during which SpaceX would be responsible for avoiding collisions.

“You’re basically just releasing the fuel, or it will take years, and by that time you’ll have crossed all the heights to get it out of the way,” Lewis said. “I can’t see how that’s a viable possibility.”

Possible human losses on the ground

One of the darker details from SpaceX’s FCC filing is when it notes that the risk of infection to people on Earth is “less than 0.0001,” which it says is “considered zero.” This would only happen if parts of the satellite survive reentry and collide with someone — an extremely rare outcome, but not “zero,” according to Ren.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Ren said. “They say they have a 10 to the power of four by a million, but that’s per satellite, so if you multiply 10 to the power of four by a million, it’s 100 people.”

Can we accept a world in which 100 people are killed by falling pieces of satellite every year? It may not be as far-fetched as it seems.

Last year, farmers near Saskatoon Finding pieces of Starlink satellites The size of laptops is large in their fields. Debris from rocket launches is more common: last year alone, rocket parts fell on a mine In AustraliaOn a farm In Argentinain Algerian desertnear A School in Argentina And in one of the warehouses In Poland.

Becca Hinojosa, a community organizer with the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, lives in Brownsville, Texas, near the SpaceX launch site.

“Every time they launch a rocket, my apartment starts shaking,” Hinojosa said. “I live 20 miles from the launch pad.”

What would happen if we reached a million satellites?

Large satellite constellations are a relatively recent phenomenon. When SpaceX launched the first batch of Starlinks in May 2019, there were only about 2,000 active satellites in the entire sky.

Since then, scientists have been ringing alarm bells about the unintended consequences that could result from sending so many objects into space. The presence of 15,000 satellites in space is already an alarming number; A million (much larger) satellites could exacerbate these problems in profound ways.

“With a million satellites, it doesn’t matter where you put them,” McDowell says. “They’re going to be noisy wherever they are.” “On the one hand, it seems crazy. On the other hand, this isn’t the first time we’ve felt this way, and they went ahead and made it work.”