Tereza is a London-based science and technology journalist, aspiring fiction writer and amateur gymnast. She worked as a reporter at the Engineering and Technology magazine, freelanced for a range of publications including Live Science, Space.
From space to the seabed, critical infrastructure is becoming more vulnerable, experts warn: 'People don't realize how dependent we are'Space Exploration This photo depicts the satellite-filled sky that is now a reality and getting more crowded every week.
The image consists of exposures taken over a 30-minute stretch in June 2024 from a latitude of 51 degrees north, when satellites even in low Earth orbit are lit all night by sunlight. Many of the parallel streaks heading generally horizontal west to east may be from groups of SpaceX Starlinks. Others traveling vertically north-south are more likely from Earth-observation satellites. There is at least one natural streak in the image — a meteor at center, caught by chance in one frame.Contact me with news and offers from other Future brandsSign up to our monthly entertainment newsletter to keep up with all our coverage of the latest sci-fi and space movies, tv shows, games and books.Discover this week's must-see night sky events, moon phases, and stunning astrophotos. Sign up for our skywatching newsletter and explore the universe with us!Space.com's Sci-Fi Reader's Club. Read a sci-fi short story every month and join a virtual community of fellow science fiction fans!Astronomers are up in arms, protesting against a proposed constellation of tens of thousands of orbiting mirrors intended to reflect light onto ground-based solar power plants and SpaceX's envisioned one million orbiting data centers. "This is really intolerable," Robert Massey, the deputy executive director at the British Royal Astronomical Society , told Space.com."It's absolutely the destruction of a central part of human heritage."Astronomers relieved as industrial plant threatening Earth's darkest sky gets cancelled RAS, the oldest astronomical society in the world, has joined the growing army of research institutions filing objections to the FCC against the proposals by, founded by former SpaceX intern Ben Nowack, has ambitions to launch 50,000 orbiting mirrors into space, each one about 180 feet wide. If those plans were to pass, the sky as humankind has known it for millions of years would change beyond recognition.Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands"Imagine a stream of satellites with that kind of magnitude crossing the sky," said Massey."It would absolutely transform our view of the sky." Add to that the million proposed SpaceX data centers, which, although dimmer, would also be visible to the naked eye. Due to the vast size of these planned constellations, there would be thousands of shining dots as bright as stars criss-crossing the firmament at any given moment. The Rubin Observatory will change the game for astronomy — if satellite companies don't get in the way Google's proposed data center in orbit will face issues with space debris in an already crowded orbit Superheavy-lift rockets like SpaceX's Starship could transform astronomy by making space telescopes cheaper Massey estimates the sky would become up to three times brighter as a result of the vast quantity of Reflect Orbital's sun-reflecting mirrors. That brightening would affect the entire planet, including remote locations that are now consideredin Chile would lose up to 10% of pixels in every image if SpaceX's one million orbiting data centers were to materialize. That number could rise to up to 30% for some kinds of observations. "That's a huge loss," Hainaut said."We keep our technical losses below 3%, and the total weather losses are about 10%." The overall increase in sky brightness caused by the Reflect Orbital mirror constellation would mean astronomers would have to triple exposure times when taking images. Fabio Felchi, a light pollution researcher at Istituto Superiore"Enrico Fermi" Mantova in Italy, told Space.com that"the only option we have to save the starry night as it was for billions of years is to put a limit on the total number of He added that a safe limit has already been passed and called for"a red-line policy on this, as there is for most other pollutants." Noelia Noel, an astrophysicist at the University of Surrey in the U.K., said that the two proposals"mark a critical moment in how we manage humanity's presence in space." "While innovation in satellite technology brings clear societal benefits, scaling to hundreds of thousands or even millions of bright objects — or deliberately illuminating thefrom orbit — risks fundamentally altering the night sky," she said."This would have profound consequences not only for astronomy but also for ecosystems, our cultural heritage, and our collective relationship with the cosmos." Some worry that the FCC is in favor of those proposals, as it's fast-tracking their evaluation without expecting the companies to carry out environmental impact assessments, astronomer and dark sky consultant John Barentine previously "The presumption now is that the application should be approved and that it should be up to the people who might object to prove that there's a problem of some kind," said Barentine."The fact that they have fast-tracked this application, which has potentially tremendous effects not only for astronomy but for the environment too, and to do so without engaging in a full environmental review, is worrisome." Tereza is a London-based science and technology journalist, aspiring fiction writer and amateur gymnast. She worked as a reporter at the Engineering and Technology magazine, freelanced for a range of publications including Live Science, Space.com, Professional Engineering, Via Satellite and Space News and served as a maternity cover science editor at the European Space Agency.Private SpaceflightFrom space to the seabed, critical infrastructure is becoming more vulnerable, experts warn: 'People don't realize how dependent we are'Launches & Spacecraft
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