Space Leaders Worldwide May Fight SpaceX Lofting 1 Million Satellites

SpaceX, after launching 10,000 satellites into orbit, aims to loft one million more in a plan that space powers around the world will likely oppose. Shown here is a simulated image released by the European Space Agency of 12,000 space objects now circling the globe. (Photo by ESA/AFP via Getty Images)

ESA/AFP via Getty Images

While Elon Musk stunned the world with plans to launch a million satellites into orbit, the heads of space agencies and spacecraft operators across the planet are certain to oppose this SpaceX scheme, says a pre-eminent space scholar.

If the American Federal Aviation Administration even hinted it might approve the lift-off of a million-strong SpaceX mega-constellation, “I would expect immediate and very strong objections from satellite operators, astronomers, insurers, national space agencies, defense organizations, and foreign governments,” says Brian Hurley, a world-leading expert who chronicles the rapid-fire expansion of the modern space sector, and its rippling effects across the spheres of national security and international affairs.

“The objections would not only come from China and Russia,” says Hurley, founder of the influential think tank New Space Economy, which also publishes a digital magazine.

“They would likely come from U.S. and European operators too, because the risk is not contained inside the company proposing the system.”

“Putting one million satellites into orbit would sharply increase the potential for inter-satellite collisions,” Hurley told me in an interview.

“At one-million-satellite scale, even tiny failure percentages become large absolute numbers. A 99.9% success rate still leaves 1,000 failed satellites.”

Failed satellites that have lost their ability to maneuver to avoid collisions could careen into other nearby satellites, potentially triggering a cascade of smash-ups.

If launched above the high-traffic rings of low Earth orbit, Hurley says, “A million satellites in higher, longer-lived orbits would be much more dangerous because failed spacecraft and debris could remain there for decades or centuries.”

The potential for out-of-control satellites rises, he adds, in the face of “solar storms, software failures, propulsion failures, bad ephemeris data, cyber issues, manufacturing defects, launch deployment anomalies, and ordinary aging.”

In advance of SpaceX making an initial public offering of shares, its founder posted a bombshell message on the SpaceX Updates website sketching out blueprints on “launching a constellation of a million satellites,” a plan that Elon Musk pledged would ultimately push forward “humanity’s multi-planetary future.”

The post by the planet’s richest aerospace aristocrat triggered space-sector shockwaves that criss-crossed the continents.

Surrounding the globe in a supermassive cloud of satellites, space scholar Brian Hurley says, “would make failed spacecraft a much larger long-term hazard.”

“If one operator fills a shell with a million satellites, every other operator using nearby or crossing orbits inherits part of that risk.”

Even the prospect of rocketing so many satellites to circle the Earth, and possibly endangering other spacecraft, could trigger a political tornado that spins across the globe.

“SpaceX,” he says, “would receive the business upside, but the collision risk, sky-brightness problem, radio-frequency coordination problem, reentry burden, and long-term debris risk would be shared by everyone.”

“That is exactly the kind of situation that produces international objections.”

Hurley says there are already portents of future protests against SpaceX’s plan, sparked by its lofting just 10,000 Starlink satellites so far into low Earth orbit.

“Astronomers and scientific institutions have objected to very large satellite and orbital infrastructure proposals,” he says, “and previous Starlink approvals have already been challenged in court by other parties.”

“A one-million-satellite proposal would multiply that reaction dramatically.”

Leading-edge sensor technologies, ranging from radars to telescopes and high-resolution space-based cameras, are now deployed by the American government and NewSpace leaders to track the human space capsules, space stations, satellites and shrapnel created in earlier collisions that are speeding around the planet at 28,000 kilometers per hour.

“LeoLabs, the U.S. Space Force, Space-Track, and the emerging NOAA/Commerce TraCSS system already provide tracking, conjunction assessments [on potential upcoming collisions], and warning services,” Hurley told me.

“LeoLabs says its radar network tracks more than 22,000 satellites, rocket bodies, and debris fragments for conjunction alerts.”

The U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron tracks the myriad rings of active and out-of-control satellites, and speeds its findings on imminent collisions to spacecraft operators that can direct avoidance maneuvers.

But expanding and upgrading these tracking systems to survey a million spacecraft would require an astronomical leap in capabilities.

At the same time, Hurley points out, “tracking is only the first layer.”

“The harder question is whether the system can maintain accurate orbit knowledge, process enormous numbers of possible conjunctions, distribute timely warnings, receive updated maneuver plans from operators, deconflict those maneuvers, and do all of that when satellites fail, operators disagree, data is incomplete, or geopolitical relationships are bad.”

“Current systems,” he says, “were not designed around a million maneuvering objects, plus debris, plus dead spacecraft, plus adversarial or non-cooperative behavior.”

“Some national space agencies and commercial partners are only now beginning to demonstrate technologies for inspecting, capturing, and deorbiting defunct satellites or spent rocket stages, while other operators have continued to leave dead spacecraft and upper stages in orbit.”

Darren McKnight, Senior Technical Fellow at the world-leading orbital mapping outfit LeoLabs, says it would be difficult to predict how long it could take to expand LeoLabs’ space surveillance system to track more than a million spacecraft whizzing through the orbital rings encircling the Earth.

One of the planet’s foremost spacecraft trackers, Dr. McKnight told me in an interview: “We are built to scale quickly and have scaled quickly enough to handle all of the shock to the system over the last few years where the number of operational satellites increased by five times.”

McKnight, who holds a doctorate in aerospace engineering from the prestigious University of Colorado and has written a torrent of breakthrough papers on space debris and its potential to trigger catastrophic collisions, says he seriously doubts “there will ever be a million operational satellites in LEO.”

“If there were,” he forecast, “it would be a gradual process to get to that point.”

“Over time, spacecraft reliability would slowly be eroded while the operational burden to mitigate collision risk would likely grow at an exponential rate (i.e., a squared effect versus a linear rate).”

“Other technologies would evolve along with this increased risk, along with us installing more radars to continue to provide responsive conjunction assessments.”

McKnight heads the data analytics team at the Silicon Valley-based LeoLabs, which operates a global web of phased array radars that scan low Earth orbit while charting tens of thousands objects in flight – from abandoned rockets to the clouds of shrapnel created by anti-satellite missile tests – that circumnavigate the globe.

LeoLabs combines cutting-edge radar imagery with predictive AI tools to model approaching orbital threats, and notifies satellite operators and other space players of high-probability smash-ups waiting in the wings.

Yet Dr. McKnight says the greatest threat to the space sector planet-wide right now is the spent rocket stages that have been jettisoned into “long-lived orbits.”

A smash-up between any two of these phantom spacecraft, he says, could ultimately spark a cascade of collisions.

He says the three space superpowers account for the overwhelming majority of massive derelict spacecraft that now threaten the future of human and robotic space exploration.

“In the last two years, China has abandoned 37 rocket bodies amounting to 156,000 kg in orbits above 650 kilometers,” he says. “These will stay in orbit for decades to centuries.”

During the first Cold War, Soviet Russia and the U.S. routinely cast off their spent upper stages in orbit, and never forged an agreement on dismantling this space obstacle course, he told me in an earlier interview.

In a fascinating study that he headed titled “Long-Lived Rocket Body Mass Accumulation in LEO,” McKnight said every one of the rockets that the world’s contending space powers have marooned above the Earth since the start of Space Race I is charted in real time and depicted via LeoLabs’ remarkable “living map of orbital activity.”

The top three contributors of rocket bodies above 615 kilometer average altitude account for more than nine tenths of all the rogue rockets still circling the planet, he said.

Russia topped the chart of cast-off rockets at this altitude, with 512 uncontrolled spacecraft that could ultimately threaten space explorers around the globe. The U.S. placed second, with 242 rockets, and China ranked third, with 135 spent upper stages.

The potential for catastrophe is skyrocketing.

Every time a collision or explosion occurs in LEO, especially at higher altitudes, the risk of more clashes rises, McKnight warned, because the debris generated is not cleared from orbit for decades, even centuries.

And so far, none of these space powers has commissioned experimental new spacecraft designed to dock with ghost rockets and guide them to a splashdown in the remote Antarctic seas, eliminating any threat to human life presented by an uncontrolled atmospheric reentry.

A smash-up between two of these titanic cast-off spaceships, McKnight says, could be cataclysmic, creating shrapnel that spreads across hundreds of kilometers and poses a risk to space capsules and satellites for generations.

“We should be worrying about the abandonment of massive objects that cannot manage their collision risk,” McKnight warns.

Meanwhile, he says that while lofting its 10,000 Starlink satellites, the greatest constellation ever created in human history, “SpaceX has proven to be able to deploy, operate, and refresh many thousands of spacecraft very safely over the last few years.”

“Currently, SpaceX operates their satellites more responsibly than any other operator: they have the lowest probability of collision (PC) threshold at which they will maneuver to reduce the PC from a conjunction, they have the lowest PC goal they wish to achieve from that maneuver, and they share multi-day propagated ephemeris for all of their spacecraft publicly.”

Ephemeris reports chart the projected flightpath of a spacecraft as it moves through the celestial sphere, and provide data on potential collisions with other craft.

In contrast, McKnight points out, some space players operate their spacecraft dangerously and erratically, “with no sharing of propagated ephemeris or maneuver plans.”

Space scholar Brian Hurley seconds McKnight’s warnings on the immense dangers posed by phantom rockets that have been abandoned by their superpower progenitors.

“Darren McKnight’s concern is consistent with a broader orbital-debris issue: large derelict rocket bodies are among the most dangerous long-lived objects in orbit because they have substantial mass and can generate large debris clouds if struck,” Hurley told me.

Meanwhile, Hurley predicts that if the FAA moves toward green-lighting a SpaceX proposal to launch a super-constellation of one million satellites, Russia and China might race to oppose the plan via “diplomatic and regulatory pressure through established international channels.”

“The main forum would be the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space,” he says. “China, Russia, or other states could raise concerns there about orbital congestion, debris risk, long-term sustainability, astronomy impacts, or the broader precedent of a million-satellite system.”

This committee is not empowered to legally block the civilian space ventures of any member state, Hurley says, “but it is the main UN venue for putting such objections formally on the international space-law and space-sustainability agenda.”

“A second route would be the Outer Space Treaty’s Article IX consultation mechanism.”

“If another state believed the proposed activity could cause ‘potentially harmful interference’ with its peaceful space activities, it could request consultations with the United States” under that treaty, Hurley says. “That would not automatically stop the project, but it would create a formal treaty-based diplomatic process.”

Ghost spacecraft tracker Darren McKnight says the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space might likewise provide a forum to press the top space powers to clear the higher orbital rings of wraith rockets that haunt the future of spaceflight.