The advocacy group PIRG is asking the US government to conduct environmental reviews of commercial internet satellites. The group’s new report warns of a space garbage problem with Earthly consequences.
These are satellites that scoot around in orbit, somewhere between 300 and 1,200 miles from Earth’s surface. For most of humanity’s ventures into the outer realms of our planet, just a few hundred such satellites orbited overhead, most of them operated and overseen by government agencies like NASA. But in the past five years, the amount of satellites in the sky has increased almost 127 times over.
Pieces of space junk have rained down from the sky—something that is a rare occurrence, but only likely to increase as more objects get put up into orbit in the first place. Satellites that have to be decommissioned can be burned up by tipping them into the atmosphere, where the friction of reentry causes them to combust. But the vaporization of various metals and plastics in the upper atmosphere can affect life on the surface in unknown ways.
Satellites Climate E-Waste Spacex
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