STARLINK — BENIGN TECH OR WOLF IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING?
Technology is essential to our daily life and to further our understanding of any field of science; be it medicine or physics or even meteorology. And astronomy is no different. Though widely considered to be the oldest science in the world, astronomy evolved more in the last 200 years than it did in the entirety of its history owing to technological advancements in the field of optics, spectroscopy and computer science. With the arrival of rockets, satellites and probes, astronomy made the jump from being a merely observational science to a field of study where experiments could be conducted in real time, though this is largely limited to our Solar System. One such product of the unrelenting march of technology is SpaceX’s Starlink, pioneered by its billionaire CEO Elon Musk as his brain child, no doubt just one of many.
From his tweets which can be described erratic at best to being the on again off again richest person in the world, Elon Musk is known for a lot of things. Not only does he lead 3 technology companies at the forefront of the industry, which in no doubt is a praise-worthy feat in itself, he even does an appreciable job of it. One among his many pet projects is the object of our discussion today, the name of which is Starlink.
But what exactly is Starlink?
Starlink is the name given to the network, or ‘constellation’ of orbital satellites launched and owned by SpaceX. Starlink’s main objective is to provide people with high speed internet services, particularly in rural and hilly areas, where achieving sound internet connectivity has always been a problem. SpaceX started working on the Starlink project in 2015. Though progress was snail-paced in the early years, it has now picked up considerable pace after receiving grant funds in the ball park of close to a billion US dollars from the Federal Communications Commission.
Presently, Starlink has more than a thousand satellites in orbit, with at least 30,000 more in line to be launched over the following few years. Eventually, satellites part of Starlink alone could blanket the entire planet, providing internet services of high speeds to all its customers having their location being taken out of the equation completely. In spite of it still being nowhere near completion, Starlink has already amassed over 10,000 customers in quite a number of countries around the world, made all the more alluring by not only the high internet speed it offers, but also its low latency, which is ideal for video conferencing and online gaming.
Sounds so flawless that the proverbial cake doesn’t even need the icing on top, doesn’t it? Maybe, maybe not.
After the launch of the first satellites part of Starlink in 2019, a lot of misgivings and concerns about this venture were expressed by many space organisations and especially the International Astronomical Union. Chief among those concerns were light pollution, which is greatly detrimental to the efforts of ground-based observational astronomy and the potential increase in space debris, which comes along with a lot of dangers on its own.
Observational astronomy is already an inordinately expensive field with many obstacles, one of them being the particularly prickly issue of light pollution, sources of which range from the surface of the Earth itself; from cities and heavily populated areas, to even the sky, the Starlink satellites in this case. This problem could and has been solved by launching telescopes and other instruments into space, but it has not endeared itself as a plausible alternative to a majority of the astronomical community due to it being exponentially more expensive as compared to ground-based astronomy.
Starlink’s satellites contribute heavily to the background noise, more properly known as artefacts, caused by light pollution that ground-based telescopes around the world capture. This is primarily due to the high number of Starlink satellites and their relative proximity to the Earth as compared to other satellites. Astronomers have expressed concerns about the brightness of these satellites as they’ve proven to be a severe deterrent to observing the night sky.
SpaceX and Elon Musk have come up with a few solutions (DarkSat and sunshades) to try and mitigate the problem of light pollution caused by the Starlink satellites. But so far, these measures have done little to placate the astronomical community as astronomers claim these measures have little to no effect since it has been observed that the brightness of the satellites were only marginally lower than before. An example of the signal pollution caused by the satellites is shown below in a 333-second exposure image taken from the Blanco four-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. The 2nd image shows 6 Starlink satellites seen in a two-second exposure.
Another pressing problem, perhaps a more dangerous one, posed by the network of satellites is over-crowding, to put it simply. The history of human space missions, both manned and unmanned, amounts to nothing more than a blip as compared to the time-span us humans have been in existence. Yet, in true human fashion, we’ve turned space into a glorified junkyard for the remains of defunct probes, satellites, and shuttles in just a few short decades.
The number of satellites to be launched itself is simply so large that it increases space debris and also the probability of collision between space debris and other satellites. Experts have warned that due to never than before high probabilities of satellite collision, it’s very much possible for a phenomenon like the Kessler Syndrome to occur which causes all satellites to become inoperable. In the early days of the project, one of the Starlink satellites came so close to colliding with one satellite belonging to the European Space Agency (ESA) that there was 1 in a 1000 chance of the collision happening. While the odds may not seem like much, in this case it was still 10 times higher than the ESA threshold for avoidance manoeuvres. And when, not if, a collision does happen, it would undoubtedly be financially damaging and could even pose a threat to human life.
To conclude, there are both pros and cons. And while it may seem like the pros outweigh the cons whichever way we choose to look at it, the problems it causes still have no solutions in sight. It’s not surprising that the public, even the precious little that know about Starlink, care for a second about the problems that it causes observational astronomy, especially given that the internet is now as much a necessary commodity for our daily consumption as food or water. And in spite of all the debate that’s raging around, it’s unlikely the Starlink project will ever be shelved.
~ Sudarshan Eshwar
