" relying on a decades-old decision to exclude 50,000 satellites from environmental review defies common sense "

I'm sure it made perfect sense for the lobbyists who made it happen. Not to mention the companies who paid the lobbyists.

When the rule was made and you could practically count the number of satellites on your fingers because they were incredibly expensive both to build and launch then it probably made sense.

When somebody is tossing very cheap satellites in orbit by the tens of thousands with a lifetime only marginally longer than a politicians memory for inconvenient facts then that might need reviewing.

...a lifetime only marginally longer than a politicians memory for inconvenient facts...

Satellites tend to last much longer than the Plank time (that being the ability of a politician to retain anything they don't want to know).

> Plank time (that being the ability of a politician to retain anything they don't want to know)

The Planck Time is how long politicians retain unfortunate truths.

The Plank Time is what we dream of applying to said politicians (one piece of wood, so many uses: dunking, nailing, swatting...)

There are all sorts of controls over what is allowed to happen and not happen in Antarctica, because of its environmental sensitivity. I don't understand why space isn't similarly controlled. You just couldn't imagine a commercial organisation saying "we've come up with a way to do something and it involves putting a load of kit into Antarctica", in the same way that SpaceX decided they wanted to get into the satellite broadband biz and started lofting thousands of satellites.

You won't win a world war in Antartica.

You will win it in SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE

First define 'winning'. If it means filling LEO with so much junk that nobody else can safely launch satellites or other spacecraft, then yes, its winnable but ultimately everybody looses.

The problem is that Musk, as usual, doesn't seem to care what damage his schemes do to others, and his chums (Bezos, etc) haven't even considered that adding another few tens of thousands of satellites to LEO space might just possibly cause collisions and so add so much junk to the LEO scrap heap that space becomes effectively inacessable.

Really, its about time that those needing high speed terrestrial comms realise that fibre is the best option, and that bulk data transfers should use fibre, if message transfer speed is the prime requirement, or geostationary satellite links where data volume rather than message flight time is the main issue, and that LEO space needs to be reserved for manned earth-orbital traffic and the arrival and departure of lunar and interplanetary space flights.

The point that seems to have been forgotten by those wanting to stuff LEO and NEO space with tens of thousands of (short life) satellites is that once they start to collide more often than they do at present, then spaceflight of almost every type will soon become almost impossible for rather a long time.

"Really, its about time that those needing high speed terrestrial comms realise that fibre is the best option, and that bulk data transfers should use fibre...".

I do wonder if the math of these LEO clusters actually make sense. No matter how you slice it designing, testing, building, and launching rockets is an expensive business and yes, does give everyone on the face of the Earth theoretical access to a high speed Internet connection. But what if the same money had been spent laying fiber everywhere, especially if we consider the lifespan of a fiber cable around 40 years which with a 5 year life for LEO space junk means 7 full replacement cycles. I'd also guess you could be providing the resulting Internet access for less than £75/month...

Just approved Starlink to do new stuff last week and as part of the deal, to reach a mutual accord with assorted telescope polishers, this bunch appears to be a bit late to the party.

> Astronomy researchers .. have joined a campaign [to] convince the .. (FCC) to reconsider exempting .. small satellites from environmental review requirements ..

Not going to happen, they're too usefull.

Astronomers definitely have a valid point but I would like them to make that point with honest numbers. Fuel load of a Falcon 9 is 123570kg. There will be about 100 Starlink launches this year. I used 14L/100km for the fuel efficiency of a dump truck. That number is old but for a smallish truck I can drive because I am the right age to have C1 on my ordinary license. Plenty of other numbers you could choose but astronomers are often content with an accuracy of multiply or divide 10. That puts the fuel required for an old small dump truck to drive around the world at about 5000kg. It would only take about 2500 trucks to match all the Starlink launches, not 7,000,000. While we are at it, driving around the world in a year is an average speed of 1.44km/h. A more honest picture would be 83 trucks each driving around the world thirty times per year (44km/h).

Do *your* "honest numbers" take into account the effects of *where* the pollutants are? How much of your ground-based emissions reach high altitude and how much of a difference does that make?

Your numbers may be more honest, or they may not, but not even mentioning such differences, not even to simply dismiss them as (in your mind) unimportant, leaves a hole in your argument big enough to fly a SpaceX constellation through.

Remember, fluorocarbons were all fine and dandy down here, but made a right mess up there.

I don't think focussing on the fuel used is helpful. If necessary, this can be dealt with through some kind of carbon-pricing, though only if all launchers agree.

What isn't in doubt, is the problem of having many tens of thousands of satellites in orbit. This causes problems in and of itself, but also, of course, when they come to end of life. We don't know the long term consequences of letting them all burn up in reentry and, if our experience of terrestial pollution has shown us anything, it's that we shouldn't wait until we have a problem before we start dealing with it.

A liability and insurance based scheme that makes companies liable for the debris would be helpful, but this probably needs accompanying by some kind of fund to stop companies declaring bankruptcy as soon as they become liable.

However, given the history of US environmental regulation, the power of commercial lobbies and the recent SCOTUS decision on the ability of government agencies to regulate, I wouldn't expect anything to happen soon; probably not until there are civil claims that force changes.