INTERNATIONAL DARK SKY ASSOCIATION vs. FCC AND SPACEX
https://cellphonetaskforce.org/astronomers-in-court-against-fcc-and-spacex/ Arthur Firstenberg, 1 May 24
On December 29, 2022, the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) sued the U.S. Federal Communications Commission over its decision to approve SpaceX’s application for up to 30,000 more low-orbit satellites, in addition to the 12,000 already approved and in process of filling our skies. This is Case No. 22-1337 before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and has not yet been decided by the court.
American plasma physicist Sierra Solter implored the FCC to “please save our night sky… Please, please, don’t take away my stars. To feel that my place of comfort and calm — a starry sky — is being taken away and given to billionaires is suffocating.”
On December 18, 2023, Ms. Solter published a scientific article detailing her fear for our planet. Each of the 42,000 planned Starlink satellites, she wrote, has a design lifespan of only 5 years, after which it will be de-orbited, burned up in the atmosphere, and replaced. She calculated that this will require 23 satellites per day — each the size of an SUV or truck — to be burned up in the atmosphere forever into the future, leaving an enormous amount of toxic chemicals and metallic dust to accumulate in the air we breathe and in the ionosphere
This is already happening, she wrote, and should be stopped if we value our lives. “Since the beginning of the space industry, approximately 20,000 tons of material have been demolished during reentry… This is over 100 billion times greater than [the mass of] the Van Allen Belts.” She estimated that if 42,000 Starlink satellites are deployed and regularly demolished — let alone the 1,000,000 satellites planned by other companies and governments — “every second the space industry is adding approximately 2,000 times more conductive material than mass of the Van Allen Belts into the ionosphere.”
“Unlike meteorites, which are small and only contain trace amounts of aluminum, these wrecked spacecraft are huge and consist entirely of aluminum and other exotic, highly conductive materials,” she explained in an April 16, 2024 article in The Guardian.
Much of the metallic dust will settle into the ionosphere where, she says, it could act as a magnetic shield, reducing the magnitude of the Earth’s magnetic field in space. If that happens, the atmosphere itself could eventually be destroyed, because the Earth’s magnetic field — the magnetosphere — is what deflects the solar wind and prevents it from stripping away Earth’s atmosphere, as she told Teresa Pulterova in an interview on Space.com.
Other astronomers involved in the litigation before the FCC and now the Court of Appeals include Meredith Rawls with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile; Gary Hunt with Action Against Satellite Light Pollution in the UK; Samantha Lawler at the University of Regina in Canada; Graeme Cuffy of Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; Mark Phillips, President of the Astronomical Society of Edinburgh; Roberto Trotta of the Imperial Centre for Inference and Cosmology in London; Carrie Nugent, Associate Professor of Computational Physics and Planetary Science at the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts; and Cameron Nelson of Tenzing Startup Consultants in Virginia.
Other issues are also mentioned in the appeal. For example, the burned up aluminum produces aluminum oxide, which destroys ozone and contributes to climate change. So does the water vapor, soot, and nitrogen oxides in rocket exhaust.
Cameron Nelson told the FCC that “Humans, not to mention all other animal and plant life, have not given our consent for SpaceX to send the signals it is proposing into our bodies and irrevocably alter us.”
The BroadBand International Legal Action Network (BBILAN) mentioned “RF/EMF radiation from linked base and earth stations” in comments sent to the FCC. Starlink earth stations, also called Gateways, are far more powerful than the Starlink dishes that people are putting on their homes. The (as of March 2024) 2.6 million Starlink dishes each send one signal up to the moving network of satellites above them. All of this traffic is coordinated in space by thousands of lasers linking the satellites to one another, and on the ground by Gateways, which relay the thousands of signals in a large geographic area to and from the satellites. This is what a Gateway with 5 antennas (“radomes”) looks like:
Some Gateways have up to 40 radomes. Each of those domes weighs 1750 kilograms. Each aims a narrow beam at moving satellites. According to FCC filings by SpaceX, each beam can have an effective radiated power of more than 1,000,000 watts, which it can aim as low as 25 degrees above the horizon. If you are a bird you do not want to fly anywhere near a Starlink Gateway. And if you are a human you do not want to live near one either. When a satellite aims its beam containing thousands of signals at a Gateway, that beam is about 10 miles in diameter by the time it reaches the Earth.
Robin is a subscriber who lives in a remote area of Idaho less than 3 miles from the Starlink Gateway in Colburn. She writes about effects on her family and her animals…………………………….Robin knows many people in her area who are similarly affected. She adds that “when we first moved here in 2019 we had A LOT of birds. We now have a silent spring, it’s like a dead zone.
At last count there were 277 Starlink Gateways in operation or under construction in the world: 181 in North America and the Caribbean, 26 in South America, 2 in Africa, 26 in Europe, and 42 in Asia and the Pacific.
The FCC maintains a webpage listing thousands of licenses that it has handed out to hundreds of companies to operate both fixed and mobile satellite earth stations in the United States. Some of these stations are far more powerful than the Starlink Gateways. SES’s earth station at Bristol, Virginia emits up to 1,900,000,000 watts of effective radiated power, and it is allowed to aim it as low as 5 degrees above the horizon. SES’s earth station at Brewster, Washington is allowed to emit almost 1,000,000 watts in the actual direction of the horizon! SES owns O3b mPOWER, which is the satellite system that had its first radomes on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship, the ship that had the famous outbreak of disease blamed on COVID-19 at the beginning of the pandemic
Not enough war on the ground, the US is taking it to space
The military industrial complex is suiting up for a new arms race, far beyond the stratosphere
STAVROULA PABST, APR 05, 2024, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/u-s-space-race/
Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX recently secured a classified contract to build an extensive network of “spy satellites” for an undisclosed U.S. intelligence agency, with one source telling Reuters that “no one can hide” under the prospective network’s reach.
While the deal suggests the space company, which currently operates over half the active satellites orbiting Earth, has warmed to U.S. national security agencies, it’s not the first Washington investment in conflict-forward space machinery. Rather, the U.S. is funding or otherwise supporting a range of defense contractors and startups working to create a new generation of space-bound weapons, surveillance systems, and adjacent technologies.
In other words, America is hell-bent on a new arms race — in space.
Space arms, then and now
Attempts to regulate weapons’ presence and use in space span decades. Responding to an intense, Cold War-era arms race between the U.S. and Soviet Union, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty established that space, while free for all countries to explore and use, was limited to peaceful endeavors. Almost 60 years later, the Outer Space Treaty’s vague language regarding military limitations in space, as space policy experts Michelle L.D. Hanlon and Greg Autry highlight, “leave more than enough room for interpretation to result in conflict.”
Stonewalling subsequent international efforts to limit the militarization of space (though the U.S. is participating in a new U.N. working group on the subject), Washington’s interest in space exploration and adjacent weapons technologies also goes back decades. Many may recall President Ronald Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which was established to develop land-, air-, and space-based missile defense systems to deter missile or nuclear weapons attacks against the U.S. Cynically referred to by critics as the “Star Wars” program, many SDI initiatives were ultimately canned due to prohibitive costs and technological limitations.
And while the Pentagon established Space Command in 1985, the Space Force, an entirely new branch of the military “focused solely on pursuing superiority in the space domain,” was launched in 2019, signaling renewed emphasis on space militarization as U.S. policy.
Weapons contractors cash in
Long-term American interest in space war tech now manifests in ambitious projects, where defense companies and startups are lining up for military contracts to create a new generation of space weaponry and adjacent tech, including space vehicles, hypersonic rockets, and extensive surveillance and communications projects.
For starters, Space Force’s Space Development Agency recently granted defense contractors L3Harris and Lockheed Martin and space company Sierra Space contracts worth $2.5 billion to build satellites for the U.S. military’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA), a constellation of hundreds of satellites, built out on tranches, that provide various warfighting capabilities, including the collection and transmission of critical wartime communications, into low-Earth orbit.
The PWSA will serve as the backbone of the Pentagon’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control project, an effort to bolster warfighting capacities and decision-making processes by facilitating “information advantage at the speed of relevance.”
Other efforts are just as sci-fi-esque. Zoning in on hypersonic weapons systems and parts, for example, RTX (formerly Raytheon) and Northrop Grumman have collaborated to secure a DARPA contract for a Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapons Concept, where scramjet-powered missiles can travel at hypersonic speeds (Mach 5 or faster) for offensive purposes.
And Aerospace startup True Anomaly, which was founded by military officers and has received funding from the U.S. Space Force to the tune of over $17 million, is developing space weapons and adjacent conflict-forward tools. An example is True Anomaly’s Jackal Autonomous Orbital Vehicle, an imaging satellite able to take on, according to True Anomaly CEO Even Rogers, “rendezvous and proximity operations missions” with “uncooperative” targets.
As True Anomaly finds fiscal success, accruing over $100 million in a December 2023 series B fundraising round from venture capitalists including Eclipse Ventures and ACME Capital, other aerospace start-ups are flooding the market with the assistance of the U.S. government, both in funding and other critical partnerships.
Take how Firehawk Aerospace — which wants to “create the rocket system of the future” to “enab[le] the next generation of aerospace and defense systems” — partnered with NASA in 2021 to test rocket engines at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. It recently secured Army Applications Laboratory and U.S. Air Force Small Business Innovation Research Awards to advance developments in its rocket motors and engines.
And data and satellite-focused American space tech company Capella Space, a contractor for federal agencies including the Air and Space Forces, specializes in reconnaissance and powerful surveillance tools, including geospatial intelligence and Synthetic Aperture Radar monitoring that help national security officials identify myriad security risks. In early 2023, Capella Space even formed a subsidiary, Capella Federal, to provide federal clients with additional access to Synthetic Aperture Radar imagery services.
We need diplomacy, not space superiority
The funding of expensive, futuristic space surveillance and weapons projects indicates the U.S.’s eagerness to maintain superiority, where military personnel posit such advancements are critical within the context of both a “space race” and an increasingly tumultuous geopolitical climate, if not the possibility of war in space outright.
As Space Force General Chance Saltzman declared at the recent Mitchell Institute Spacepower Security Forum: “if we do not have space, we lose.” Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee in late February, U.S. Space Force General Stephen N. Whiting explained that the U.S. Space Command must bolster its military capacities through increased personnel training and investments in relevant technologies so that the U.S. is “ready if deterrence fails.”
While upping its own military capacities, however, Washington is simultaneously pushing against other countries’ anti-satellite weapons testing, a capability the U.S. already has.
In any case, such pointing fingers, when coupled with ongoing space deterrence and weapons proliferation efforts, does little to advance genuine diplomacy, where states could instead discuss, on equal terms, how space should be used and shared amongst nations.
Ultimately, weapons and aerospace companies’ efforts have launched a new generation of weaponry and adjacent tech — buoyed by consistent support from a “deterrence”-focused U.S. As a result, the military industrial complex has further expanded into the domain of space, where defense companies have new opportunities to score lucrative weapons contracts and theoretically even push for more conflict.
Get These Rich People Off the Moon
Other than allowing billionaires and private companies to benefit from taxpayer-funded pipe dreams and advertising, the value of going to the moon for all mankind is not at all clear.
The US military has also expressed an interest in renting Starships for their Space Force cargo and troops — delivering war to poor countries anywhere in the world within one hour.
Despite the mess it makes on Earth, NewSpace investments are growing in popularity among everyman-for-himself superrich techies
BY PETER HOWSON,on behalf of Koohan Paik-Mander
Texas start-up Intuitive Machines has achieved the first moon landing by a private firm. It’s dumping rich people’s detritus on the lunar surface — a grim sign of how the superrich plan to plant their flag beyond our own planet.
Amid tears of joy at their Houston control room, the Texas start-up Intuitive Machines successfully landed on the moon. Their uncrewed lander, known as Odysseus, hitched a ride on a SpaceX rocket last week, touching down near the moon’s south pole on Thursday. After many failed attempts by various private outfits, Intuitive Machines is the first private company to plant a free-market flag on the moon
In January, a different US private venture crashed back to Earth. Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander had been supposed to dispose of at least seventy dead rich people (and one rich dog) on the lunar surface.
Spending billions of dollars dumping odd things in space has become a tradition among the lunar classes. Elon Musk famously sent a Tesla Roadster as the dummy payload for the 2018 Falcon Heavy test flight. Driven by a mannequin in a spacesuit dubbed “Starman,” the car is now an enduring satellite of the sun. You can track him, if you like.
The Japanese isotonic drinks company Pocari Sweat has been trying to leave a can of pop on the moon since 2014. It finally crashed with Astrobotic’s failed $100 million lander. The Japanese still plan to send a hydrogen-powered Toyota “Lunar Cruiser” up there, despite a few explosive setbacks.
Toxic Effects
Other than allowing billionaires and private companies to benefit from taxpayer-funded pipe dreams and advertising, the value of going to the moon for all mankind is not at all clear. British astronaut Tim Peake suggests the microgravity up there might one day enable exotic treatments for all sorts of diseases, albeit expensive treatments for those who can afford them. Aside from body parts, fizzy pop, and “art,” the squillion-dollar landers are packed full of instruments designed for exploring the unknown, before anyone else gets their mitts on it.
So called “NewSpace” companies are on the prowl for profitable rare earth metals, helium-3, and water. Just like the spice of Arrakis, helium-3 is being pitched as “the most precious resource in the universe.” At least it might be if someone invents a use for it. Getting large quantities of water to space is pricey. A stable reservoir will keep plebs alive while they mine for spice. And both hydrogen and oxygen can make the rocket fuel needed to search for shiny things further afield.
It all sounds very exciting. But realizing these fantasies has costs for the rest of us. According to Atrium, a big insurer for rocket-makers, early space-faring outfits should typically expect 30 percent of their launches to end in catastrophic failure. When two separate SpaceX Starship launches in Texas went south last year, toxic particulates rained down on people’s homes. Debris broke windows and caused fires that burned across Boca Chica Park, home to endangered birds and ocelot cats.
“We never gave our consent,” said one indigenous Carrizo-Comecrudo representative at a SpaceX protest in South Texas. “Yet they [SpaceX] are moving forward. It’s colonial genocide of native people and native lands.” Bekah Hinojosa of the Texas environmental group Another Gulf Is Possible claims environmental deregulation, tax breaks, and subsidies have been used by the Texas state government to lure SpaceX in. Meanwhile local indigenous communities who rely on Boca Chica’s fish to feed their families feel their customary land is being sacrificed.
For the Navajo people, the costly blunders are no bad thing. The Navajo hold the moon to be sacred, and consider fly-tipping and mining there an act of profound desecration. According to the Navajo Nation’s president Dr Buu Nygren, “The sacredness of the Moon is deeply embedded in the spirituality and heritage of many Indigenous cultures, including our own.”
Wars on Our Home Planet
Yet, despite the mess they’re making, SpaceX plans on going bigger and bigger.
SpaceX will soon be moving its monster Starship boosters from Boca Chica to the much larger Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Like the Falcon 9, SpaceX’s Starship is designed as a workhorse for frequent, repeated flights. Instead of only a couple of launches per year, Kennedy will start to resemble an airport. The same powerful and destructive super heavy-lift rockets that devastated Boca Chica will be lifting off on a near daily basis from the Florida coast.
The US military has also expressed an interest in renting Starships for their Space Force cargo and troops — delivering war to poor countries anywhere in the world within one hour.
NewSpace is scaling up US geopolitical influence behind a facade of free-market competition. In Indonesia, SpaceX has edged out Beijing to become the country’s satellite launch partner of choice. The partnership was achieved through the personal relationship Musk nurtured with outgoing Indonesian president Joko Widodo. The deal marks a rare instance of a US company making inroads in Indonesia, whose telecommunications sector is dominated by Chinese outfits offering low costs and easy financing. Some see the SpaceX deal as just a sweetener for Musk to build a new Tesla factory somewhere in Indonesia. The electric vehicle-maker has so far signed contracts worth billions for Indonesia’s nickel and other essential materials for the company’s car batteries.
As well as ripping up Indonesia’s pristine forests for luxury car bits, plans to furnish Musk with a new spaceport on the island of Biak, Papua, is fermenting anger among indigenous Warbon peoples. Clearances for the spaceport are reigniting ethnic tensions and military violence. Somewhere between 40 and 150 Papuans protesting the spaceport have been killed by the Indonesian military since the plans were originally unveiled.
Real People Are Gross
Despite the mess it makes on Earth, NewSpace investments are growing in popularity among everyman-for-himself superrich techies.
For them, dealing with today’s real social and environmental problems tends to involve paying icky taxes and/or remunerating their workers fairly. Meanwhile, finding solutions for potential future problems is far more profitable. For billionaires, “longtermism” packages up this predicament beautifully.
Factoring future populations into decision-making models is just a nice, sustainable thing to do. Longtermism on the other hand, is too much of a good thing. It’s an extreme utilitarian, accelerationist ideology asking us to drastically increase rates of economic growth and technological advancement to ensure humanities’ long-term survivability as a multiplanetary species.
Meanwhile, taxes and government interventions are framed as an impediment to growth and innovation. For these longtermists, someone potentially not being born on Mars in the far distant future is in many ways far worse than someone actually dying of a preventable disease or poverty today. Mars guy is super smart and loaded. Unlike the stinky real person, Mars guy is likely to live a long happy life free of dysentery. He’s white because rich people tend to be that way.
If this all sounds a bit fascist, that’s because it is. According to Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, widely considered the founding father of longtermism, “blacks are more stupid than whites,” as he once said on an extropian community message board. “I like that sentence and think it is true.” Bostrom then used an offensive slur beginning with “N.” “It seems that there is a negative correlation in some places between intellectual achievement and fertility,” he argued. “If such selection were to operate over a long period of time, we might evolve into a less brainy but more fertile species.” He later apologized for coming across as “racist.”
Thanks in part to Musk, the cost of space travel has dropped considerably. A seat on a Falcon 9 rocket and an eight-day stay on the International Space Station (ISS) now only costs $82 million. Musk predicts his one-way tickets to Mars will cost somewhere between $500,000 to $1 million, a price at which he thinks “it’s highly likely that there will be a self-sustaining Martian colony.” For the poors, Musk has an indentured labor package where workers take out a loan to pay for their tickets, paying them off later by mining for spice or something.
Life on Earth will end one day (we have somewhere between one and five billion years). But the universe will also end. What then? We could just keep on running through the vacuum of a dying universe. Or, instead of living as slaves obsessing over spice and birth quotas for some odious space baron, we could take a leaf from the Navajo’s book, taking the moon for sacred, and mountains, lakes, and rivers, too. If we treat our planet right, we might just live longer and better.
I’ll admit: I wrote two versions of this article, depending on the fate of the Intuitive Machines lander. In 1969, President Richard Nixon did something similar, just in case everyone died onboard Apollo 11. But when it comes to NewSpace, there’s no need for tears or alternative endings.
Private space missions will only ever serve the billionaires, not us.
If we make no effort to change direction, we will end up where we are heading.”
The new space race Is Causing New Pollution Problems
NY Times, Ed Friedman Tue, 30 Jan 2024
The high-altitude chase started over Cape Canaveral on Feb. 17, 2023, when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched. Thomas Parent, a NASA research pilot, was flying a WB-57 jet when the rocket ascended past the right wing — leaving him mesmerized before he hit the throttle to accelerate.
For roughly an hour, Mr. Parent dove in and out of the plume in the rocket’s wake while Tony Casey, the sensor equipment operator aboard the jet, monitored its 17 scientific instruments. Researchers hoped to use the data to prove they could catch a rocket’s plume and eventually characterize the environmental effects of a space launch.
In the past few years, the number of rocket launches has spiked as commercial companies — especially SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk — and government agencies have lofted thousands of satellites into low-Earth orbit. And it is only the beginning. Satellites could eventually total one million, requiring an even greater number of space launches that could yield escalating levels of emissions.
SpaceX declined to comment about pollution from rockets and satellites. Representatives for Amazon and Eutelsat OneWeb, two other companies working toward satellite mega-constellations, said they are committed to sustainable operations. But scientists worry that more launches will scatter more pollutants in pristine layers of Earth’s atmosphere. And regulators across the globe, who assess some risks of space launches, do not set rules related to pollution.
Image
The exhaust plume from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket taking off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in 2018,Credit…Matt Hartman/Associated Press
Experts say they do not want to limit the booming space economy. But they fear that the steady march of science will move slower than the new space race — meaning we may understand the consequences of pollution from rockets and spacecraft only when it is too late. Already, studies show that the higher reaches of the atmosphere are laced with metals from spacecraft that disintegrate as they fall back to Earth.
“We are changing the system faster than we can understand those changes,” said Aaron Boley, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia and co-director of the Outer Space Institute. “We never really appreciate our ability to affect the environment. And we do this time and time again.”
……………………………… By the time a rocket curves into orbit, it will have dumped in the middle and upper layers of the atmosphere as much as two-thirds of its exhaust, which scientists predict will rain down and collect in the lower layer of the middle atmosphere, the stratosphere.
The stratosphere is home to the ozone layer, which shields us from the sun’s harmful radiation. But it is extremely sensitive: Even the smallest of changes can have enormous effects on it — and the world below.
………………………….Just how rockets will affect that relatively clear top, the stratosphere, remains uncertain. But scientists are concerned that black carbon, or soot, that is released from current rockets will act like a continuous volcanic eruption, a change that could deplete the ozone layer and affect the Earth below.
……………………………………………… A Race Against the Space Race
As space companies set records for launches and satellites deployed, scientists are starting to quantify the potential effects.
In a paper published in 2022, soot from rockets was shown to be nearly 500 times as efficient at heating the atmosphere as soot released from sources like airplanes closer to the surface. It’s the muddy-barrel effect.
“That means that as we start to grow the space industry and launch more rockets, we’re going to start to see that effect magnify very quickly,” said Eloise Marais, an associate professor in physical geography at University College London and an author of the study.
That said, Dr. Maloney’s team did not quantify how much more radiation exposure could occur.
The exact amounts of soot emitted by different rocket engines used around the globe are also poorly understood. Most launched rockets currently use kerosene fuel, which some experts call “dirty” because it emits carbon dioxide, water vapor and soot directly into the atmosphere. But it might not be the predominant fuel of the future. SpaceX’s future rocket Starship, for example, uses a mix of liquid methane and liquid oxygen propellants.
Still, any hydrocarbon fuel produces some amount of soot. And even “green rockets,” propelled by liquid hydrogen, produce water vapor, which is a greenhouse gas at these dry high altitudes.
“You can’t take what’s green in the troposphere and necessarily think of it being green in the upper atmosphere,” Dr. Boley said. “There is no such thing as a totally neutral propellant. They all have different impacts.”
Smithereens of Satellites
What goes up must come down. Once satellites in low-Earth orbit reach the end of their operational lifetimes, they plunge through the atmosphere and disintegrate, leaving a stream of pollutants in their wake. Although scientists do not yet know how this will influence Earth’s environment, Dr. Ross thinks that it will be the most significant impact from spaceflight.
A study published in October found that the stratosphere is already littered with metals from re-entering spacecraft. It used the same NASA WB-57 jet that chased the SpaceX rocket plume last year, studying the stratosphere over Alaska and much of the continental U.S.
When the researchers began analyzing the data, they saw particles that didn’t belong. Niobium and hafnium, for example, do not occur naturally but are used in rocket boosters. Yet these metals, along with other distinct elements from spacecraft, were embedded within roughly 10 percent of the most common particles in the stratosphere.
The findings validate earlier theoretical work, and Dr. Boley, who was not involved in the study, argues that the percentage will only increase given that humanity is at the beginning of the new satellite race.
Of course, researchers cannot yet say how these metals will affect the stratosphere.
“That’s a big question that we have to answer moving forward, but we can’t presume that it won’t matter,” Dr. Boley said.
…………………………………..scientists argue, satellite operators and rocket companies need regulations. Few are currently in place.
“Space launch falls into a gray area,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who has been involved in a working group on this research. “It falls between the cracks of all the regulatory authorities.”
The Montreal Protocol, for instance, is a treaty that successfully set limits on chemicals known to harm the ozone layer. But it does not address rocket emissions or satellites.
In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency is not responsible for analyzing rocket launches. The Federal Communications Commission licenses large constellations of satellites but does not consider their potential harm to the environment. (The Government Accountability Office called for changes to that F.C.C. policy in 2022, but they have yet to occur.) And the Federal Aviation Administration assesses environmental impacts of rocket launches on the ground, but not in the atmosphere or space.
That could put the stratosphere’s future in the hands of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other private space company executives — which is particularly worrying to Dr. Boley, who says the space industry does not want to slow down.
“Unless it immediately affects their bottom line, they’re simply not interested,” he said. “The environmental impact is an inconvenience.”……… https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/science/astronomy-telescopes-satellites-spacex-starlink.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article—
1.This month.
13 July Webinar: Don’t Nuke The Climate: how to counter the nuclear disinformation
Saturday July 13 from 10.30am till 12pm.
British High Court Grants WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange the Right to Appeal U.S. Extradition.
Antinuclear 