However, the number of artificial satellites, abandoned boosters and other debris in Earth orbit is huge. This new report warns that for projects like the SpaceX Starlink satellite constellation, the space debris problem may be approaching a critical turning point.

I spoke with Aaron Boley, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia, who co-authored the new study with legal scholar Michael Byers.

He told me: “At present, Starlink has been fully approved within the current legal system and can continue to launch 12,000 satellites. They hope to add another 30,000 satellites, so there will be 42,000 satellites. Starlink alone will have more satellites. There are no visible stars in the sky.”

This is not all. Other companies have similar plans, including OneWeb, Amazon, Telesat and GW. The latter is a Chinese state-owned company.

Such an astonishing number of satellites will exceed the total number of objects orbiting the earth today, and will form a shell around the earth in low earth orbits up to an altitude of about 750 kilometers.

One of the problems with these huge constellations is the visual pollution they can cause in the night sky. You may have even seen them-under the right conditions you can see these fast-moving satellites.

Astronomers were not satisfied with this, and some groups called for legal action to stop Starlink and its competitors. Scientists would rather look at real constellations than satellite constellations that can pass through the telescope’s field of view and destroy the picture of the universe.

But Aaron Boley emphasized that it may be a bigger problem. When objects fall into orbit the more times they collide with other satellites outside the orbit, astronauts working in space, and ground personnel.

The new satellites launched by SpaceX and other companies are not only deliberately thrown away. They are placed in careful orbits to minimize the risk of collisions, while modern satellites are designed to go out of orbit when they die, rather than just being abandoned as space junk. Commercial aerospace companies must develop plans to do this in an organized and safe manner. All this is good and responsible.

But Boley is worried about the possibility and impact of the accident. Randomly scattered untracked space debris, and even meteors, may cause these satellites to malfunction, thereby undermining their prudent orbit and de-orbit plans. The sheer number of these new satellites increases the risk.

This could lead to a disaster. The relative speed is so fast in space that objects that touch each other are often blown into fragments, and these fragments add to the problem. Every time a collision occurs, more debris is added, which increases more danger. Once the collision becomes an out of control cascade, it may make the valuable real estate in low earth orbit extremely dangerous.

Another possible unexpected result of these satellite constellations proposed by Boley and Byers is that, even if there is no accident, as these thousands of satellites age and de-orbit, the rainfall on this dead satellite may also have an impact on the climate.

When burning an object from space, it will not disappear completely. Satellites are mainly made of aluminum, a material that stays high in the sky for a period of time. High-altitude aluminum particles have been proposed as one of the geoengineering strategies, in which aluminum particles reflect sunlight back into space and cool the climate.

There have been opposition to the idea of ??deliberate geoengineering. The falling satellite may trigger uncontrolled experiments on the Earth’s atmosphere.

Boley told me: “The development of space exceeds our ability to understand what type of regulatory mechanism is needed to ensure safe and sustainable progress.”

“We need to advance regulations before the constellation is fully completed, rather than deal with it afterwards. We need to go beyond thinking of one satellite per satellite, but to think about how we supervise the entire satellite system internationally.

Hope it will not reach the point where one day we may have to change the children’s song to “Twinkle twinkle little Starlink…”.