Musk eyes 30,000 LEO satellites–but how many are too many?

It’s possible to have too much of a good thing. The trick is knowing how much is too much.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX currently has permission from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch 12,000 satellites for its Starlink Internet broadband constellation.

For context, as of last month 12,480 satellites have been launched in all of human history. But SpaceX recently filed applications with regulators to launch another 30,000 as part of its second-generation constellation, Gen2.

Just how many is too many?

NASA has “concerns” this might be. In a five-page letter to the FCC, the space agency said it is worried about the potential for a “significant increase” in conjunction events (a polite way of describing satellite crashes in orbit, or at least two objects coming close), as well as possible impact on its own spaceflight activities.

Gen2 “would more than double the number of tracked objects in orbit,” of which there are currently 25,000, according to NASA. But more impressively, in the low Earth orbit (LEO) zone below 600km, where there are now 6,100 objects, Gen2 would increase the number more than fivefold.

Amazon, which is building the Kuiper satellite broadband Internet system, also wrote to the FCC to complain that its orbital overlap with Gen2 would bring a “dramatic increase in risks and other burdens” for its own system, and Dish Network has written with concerns as well.

Commercial competition is clearly a concern for both companies, but their complaints beg some important questions, like how many LEO satellites would be too many – and how close are we to that number? And what happens if we surpass it?

Light Reading asked several space experts what they thought.

How many LEO satellites is too many?

“As things stand, I don’t think we are close to ‘too many’ LEO satellites, although the numbers planned are concerning,” said Alexandra Stickings, space strategy lead at the Frazer-Nash Consultancy, an engineering and technology consultancy based in the UK and Australia.

But “at what stage we will hit a point of no return in terms of how congested low Earth orbit is – that is debatable,” she added.

Hira Virdee, founder and CEO at Lumi Space, a UK satellite startup, has an idea: “My hunch is about 20,000 satellites,” he said.

How can we avoid collisions in space?

Starlink has begun work on active satellite self-management, where satellites collect data from as many sources as possible and automatically communicate among each other about avoidance maneuvers.

But launches – and ensuring there are no objects in the way of a satellite rocketing into orbit – will always be dicey.

To read the complete article, visit Light Reading.