And it’s not coming back

Something you didn’t know you had is going away.

In 2019 a number of amateur astronomers noticed something peculiar in the sky early in the evening.  A “string of pearls,” a formation of starlike objects, moved against the stars; not as fast as meteors, not as bright as the brightest stars, but still clear to the naked eye.  Of course they were identified as artificial satellites.  There was nothing new in seeing satellites by that year, though these were brighter than most, and a formation of several was unusual.  But it happened several times.  In fact it was the first effort of the SpaceX Starlink project, totaling some 60 objects.  The purpose of this set of satellites is to bring the internet to everywhere on the planet, including locations at sea and uninhabited places that now lack access.  The first set of 60 was just the beginning.  The eventual total (according to a filing with the agency that regulates radio frequencies) will be 41,926.  OneWeb, a UK company, expects to launch a somewhat smaller effort, at 6372; Amazon Kuiper, 3236; and Guo Wang, in China, 12,992.  There are other players, bringing the total (according to a listing we’ve seen) up to 78,265.

Now, we suppose that making the internet available everywhere is a good thing, though if the idea is expressed another way–that you can never escape the internet–it doesn’t sound quite so attractive.  And we know there’s no going back to the days of an old encyclopedia we’re just seen (dating from two-thirds of the way through the last century), when all the satellite launches by anyone from anywhere could be listed in one short table.  But the appearance of tens of thousands of artificial stars completely changes the night sky.

Professional astronomer are worried, and should be.  Consider the Vera Rubin telescope, constructed over most of a decade at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.  It’s designed to image the entire visible sky each week, to a depth that took photographic surveys a decade or two to do once.  It will see objects a million (that’s not an exaggeration) times fainter than Starlink satellites. . . if there isn’t a Starlink satellite in the way.  Here’s an analogy: you’re trying to count all the fireflies in a forest on the far side of the valley at night.  There’s a road in between.  There used to be a car on the road every half-hour or so.  Now a continuous traffic is building up, all using their high beams.  To its credit, SpaceX has made efforts to make its satellites less bright.  That has the approximate effect of going from high beams to regular.  In any case, this amazing facility will be routinely blinded.  And it’s not just a matter of looking through the results and deleting an image file here and there.  The amount of data the telescope will produce makes it impossible for a human to monitor it all; the pipeline has to be automated.

Amateur astronomers and telescopes with smaller fields of view will be less affected, since they either don’t look at objects as faint, or have a smaller chance of having a satellite in the field of view.  We’ve seen various estimates and calculations.  But consider: there will be thousands of satellites visible to the naked eye for hours after sundown and before sunrise.  Most of the lights you see in the sky during those times won’t be stars.

The real lesson here is not that expensive, highly-capable scientific equipment will have serious trouble doing its job, nor that a few hobbyists will be inconvenienced.  It’s that something you’ve enjoyed (and assumed would always be there) can be taken away by someone with money, and there’s nothing you can do about it.