Satellites provide internet access and a lot more, but the skies are getting crowded

Satellite internet has been around for decades. But in just the past six years, the number of satellites orbiting the planet has grown dramatically. Many of those belong to Starlink, a unit of SpaceX whose satellites are in low Earth orbit.

And it’s expected to get even busier up there with Amazon’s Project Kuiper launching thousands of new satellites. Joe Supan of CNET recently wrote about the industry and the environment in which these machines operate. He told Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes about the race to claim a piece of space and the risk of high-tech debris clogging the zone.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Joe Supan: It’s really a game changer for people in very rural areas where they haven’t built out fiber or cable lines. And in those situations, they’re pretty much stuck choosing between those slower satellite options or sometimes fixed wireless or [digital subscriber line], all of which are prohibitively expensive and slow. Starlink is also expensive; it’s $120 a month, and you have to pay $350 for equipment. So that’s, like, double what most people pay for internet in this country. But when I talk to people who use Starlink in rural areas, they all pretty much, unprompted, said, “It’s much cheaper than what I was paying for before.” So it might seem like a lot to us, but in rural areas it’s actually pretty competitive.

Stephanie Hughes: I’ve kind of forgotten how young Starlink was. I feel like it’s been in the vocab for a while, but it really is just in, like, the past five years it’s gotten going. Tell me about what that’s meant for the number of satellites up in the skies.

Supan: When Starlink first launched in 2019, there were only 2,000 satellites. And Starlink has 7,000 alone right now. They have suggested that they want as many as 42,000, so they have the vast majority of satellites in the sky currently. But there’s also projections that there will be 100,000 total by the end of the decade. So they really kind of like kicked off this race to low Earth orbit.

Hughes: Yeah, and that’s not just from Starlink, right? Like, there’s other companies getting into this?

Supan: Yeah. Project Kuiper is the most well known. Pretty soon after Starlink, they started working on their own, and they’re just starting to launch satellites now, but the service is still not available. They plan on having a good number in there too. There’s a Chinese company that’s also working on building their own mega-constellation. So it’s really kind of a race to get satellites up there right now.

Hughes: What does this ever-growing number of satellites mean for how they navigate around each other? Like, is it getting crowded?

Supan: Absolutely. That’s a big concern for the space community. And Starlink has been very good about maneuvering their satellites so that they avoid space debris or other Starlink satellites. But the fact that they’re moving so much also makes it harder for other objects in space to account for them. Someone described it to me as like, if everyone on the road is trying to avoid an accident all the time, eventually you’re going to have an accident.

Hughes: You wrote about how space debris is an increasing concern, both in space and then also space debris here on Earth. Tell me about that.

Supan: One term that is thrown out there a lot is called the Kessler syndrome, which is if you have one collision, that’ll create more space debris, and it’ll kind of set off this chain reaction where eventually the sky is just so littered with small objects that it becomes impossible to launch satellites. So we’re not there yet, but it’s hard to say that we’re even close. But it’s such uncharted territory, with the amount of satellites that we’re adding every day, that people are getting more and more worried about that.

Hughes: And what does it mean? Should we be worried about it? I mean, there’s a lot up there, if it’s all doing its thing, even if it’s in tiny pieces. Like, what could be the effects for us here on Earth?

Supan: The effects would be that we just wouldn’t be able to use satellites anymore. I mean, that’s a worst-case scenario, but yeah, we rely on these things for so much more than just satellite internet, even though that is something that we’re using so much more these days. But it could also mean things like the GPS could go out. It could affect the International Space Station, things like that.

Hughes: Back in 2019, we talked to an astronomer who was concerned about what all those satellites would mean for our ability to observe the heavens, as the poets among us might say. Was he right to be concerned?

Supan: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I spoke with a few astronomers for this piece, and they’re fairly cautious about saying, yes, this is a horrible thing, because SpaceX has been very responsive to their concerns. Like those collision maneuvers I was talking about earlier, they’ve really tried to hear out scientists and adjust based on what they’re saying. They’ve also implemented some brightness mitigation techniques. So they have done a good job. When they first launched, they were very bright. Even SpaceX themselves were kind of shocked how bright they were. So it’s gotten a lot better since then, but they’re also increasing the number that they’re launching by many orders of magnitude. So there is a chance, probably a reasonable chance, that ground-based astronomy will look a lot different in the next 10 years.

Hughes: What rules are there about satellites in the skies? Who’s in charge?

Supan: It’s a kind of a Wild, Wild West out there. NASA, obviously, has rules about how these satellites can operate, but that’s just our country. And they’ve kind of let SpaceX dictate what their own rules are, to some degree. So they’ve been pretty responsible with how they deploy this constellation, but there’s really no guarantee that other companies will follow their same standards.

Hughes: What do you expect to happen with the number of satellites in the coming years?

Supan: I think they’ll continue to increase. For Starlink, specifically, I don’t know if they’ll get up to that 42,000 number, but they’re now launching these bigger, heavier satellites that should have much greater bandwidth. So theoretically, they shouldn’t need as many as they have previously. But I think that 100,000 [satellites operating] by the end of the decade is pretty likely.

Hughes: You end your piece with this really lovely quote from a professor of planetary science, who says that the “challenges that come with satellites are hard to convey to the general public, because when you look up at the sky, the debris looks like it’s just a dot.” What does that distance mean for the future of this industry and how we think about it?

Supan: I think it kind of means that there’s no pressure from the general public. So I think regulating this industry is not really at the top of any politician’s list because it’s just not really being discussed that much. And the consequences are kind of hard to describe for people. [For example,] debris hits a satellite up there, hard to kind of connect that to how that would affect someone’s everyday life. But we have become so dependent on these things that it could be quite catastrophic if something like that Kessler syndrome happened.