Nearly half of all active satellites in Earth's orbit belong to SpaceX, is that a problem?

SpaceX is dominating Earth's orbit with its Starlink internet satellites, which now account for half of all active satellites. The aerospace company added 21 new satellites to its rapidly expanding Starlink fleet on February 27, bringing the total number of active Starlink satellites to 3,660, as per a report from Science News. This means that Starlink satellites make up around 50 percent of the almost 7,300 active satellites currently orbiting the planet. Astronomer Jonathan McDowell analyzed data from SpaceX and the U.S. Space Force to arrive at these figures.

McDowell, who works at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said that “these big low-orbit internet constellations have come from nowhere in 2019, to dominating the space environment in 2023". “It really is a massive shift and a massive industrialization of low orbit," McDowell added. 

How are SpaceX satellites impacting efforts to observe the cosmos?

SpaceX's Starlink satellite launches have been ongoing since 2019 with the aim of providing broadband internet to remote areas worldwide. However, astronomers have been raising concerns about the impact of these bright satellites on their observations of the cosmos. As the satellites move across the sky, they can leave streaks on telescope images, affecting the accuracy of the data collected.

Even the Hubble Space Telescope, which orbits at an altitude of over 500 kilometers above the Earth's surface, is not immune to these streaks, as well as those caused by other satellite constellations. According to a report published on March 2 in Nature Astronomy by astronomer Sandor Kruk and his colleagues at the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, the percentage of Hubble images affected by low-orbit satellite light has increased by around 50 percent from 2002 to 2021.

While the percentage of Hubble telescope images partially obstructed by satellites is still relatively low, it is on the rise, according to a recent report by a team of astronomers. Between 2002 and 2005, nearly 3 percent of images taken by one of Hubble's cameras were blocked by satellites, compared to just over 4 percent between 2018 and 2021. Although this increase may seem small, it is worth noting that there are already thousands more Starlink satellites in orbit now than there were in 2021, which could have a significant impact on astronomers' ability to conduct research.