Thousands of Falling Satellites Put Atmosphere at Risk

What goes up, must come down: Bloomberg's Eric Roston and Sana Pashankar break down their reporting on what happens to the increasing number of satellites that are sent into space when they become obsolete and the impact it has on the atmosphere.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has more than 7,000 satellites in orbit to create its Starlink internet constellation. The company has said in the past that it plans to have as many as 42,000 units aloft, each with a roughly five-year life expectancy.

To maintain a fleet that size, astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell estimates the company will need to launch the equivalent of 23 satellites a day — and boot the same number out of orbit, to burn up at the top of the atmosphere.

SpaceX is the most prodigious launcher, but it’s far from the only company looking to fill space. On Monday, Amazon.com Inc.’s Project Kuiper put its first 27 production satellites into orbit as Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos looks to build out an internet constellation to compete against Starlink.

Last year, more than 2,800 satellites were deployed compared to 500 in 2019, according to an analysis by McDowell, who works at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and also privately publishes data on space launches and satellites.

Satellites in low-Earth orbit eventually have to come down, and companies rely on the upper atmosphere to act as a waste incinerator. That’s exposed a blind spot in environmental laws: They only deal with pollution from human activities near Earth’s surface. But just as carbon dioxide and ozone-destroying compounds drifting up have created problems, so too can pollutants raining down at ever-increasing rates.

Studying stratospheric pollution is a burgeoning field. The first wave of research that started about 5 years ago shows that dosing the atmosphere with soot from rocket fuel and particles of reentering satellites might set back decades of progress repairing the ozone layer and indirectly alter the weather.

The satellite industry boom could exacerbate the effects scientists have observed. In the next five years, the number of satellites in orbit is projected to grow from roughly 12,000 today to between nearly 60,000 and 100,000. By 2035, Goldman Sachs projects that the value of the satellite industry will reach $108 billion, up from $15 billion today.

“We’re right now at that point that we see there is a problem coming,” said Kostas Tsigaridis, a research scientist at Columbia University’s Center for Climate Systems Research.

Low-Earth orbit satellites are designed to burn up in the atmosphere. But the problem with treating spacecraft as disposable is that the garbage still has to go somewhere, just as it does with industrial waste or consumer products.

In the case of satellites, particles are ending up in the atmosphere. The amount of material hanging atop the atmosphere isn’t a problem yet, but it’s giving atmospheric scientists a case of déjà vu.

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