by Jay Yuzovitskiy
After his failed plot to stop California from building high speed rail, tech billionaire and alleged sex pest Elon Musk has founded a new venture: Starlink. A network of satellites in orbit around the Earth, Starlink’s stated goal is to provide “high-speed internet around the world.” As of September 2024, the service is still slower than cable, and has been the subject of numerous controversies. Most recently, Musk offered the service for free for 30 days to Americans affected by Hurricane Helene. An investigation by The Register showed that, despite the claims, Musk’s Starlink was still charging a $400 installation fee. The service would also take months to install, meaning those left without internet connectivity due to the storm will likely regain access before the hardware is installed.
But there’s a numerical problem with the satellites, as well: there are way too many of them. With 6,426 currently in orbit and up to 42,000 planned in the next decades, they are a significant obstacle for observational astronomers. Large observatories like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey are located on the ground at high elevations, allowing them to take unobstructed pictures of the sky. But low Earth orbit satellites, such as the ones used by Starlink, can fly in between a telescope and the object it’s pointed at. The satellites then reflect light from the sun into the observatory, causing disruptive splotches in the final images called ‘glints.’ To complicate matters, telescopes take long exposures, often collecting image data for up to 15 seconds at a time. This means that the same satellite can create multiple glints over time, which are all included in the final image. This phenomenon, which scientists call a ‘streak,’ is shown in the figure below.
A Starlink ‘streak’ captured by https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/
Astronomers, to their credit, are doing everything they can to minimize the effects of these imperfections. Scientists at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, expected to start collecting data in late 2025, have begun training machine learning models to remove streaks from astronomical data. Their methods involve training computers to identify the streaks and remove them before sending them to astronomers for analysis. Still, the issue is an unexpected and costly one that, likely, Musk and Starlink won’t be held responsible for.
The streaks and glints also pose a policy problem. Simply put, lawmakers didn’t expect anyone to do what Musk has done with Starlink. Space real estate is difficult to regulate, and Starlink’s rapid growth has made the streaks a time-sensitive issue. The Biden administration has addressed Starlink’s growth in their 2025 fiscal year budget, proposing a modest tax on private corporations to dissuade them from attempting to monopolize space. But it remains to be seen whether this tax will actually go into effect — Musk’s political activism could influence policy proceedings if Donald Trump wins in November.
This is not the first time an unexpected challenge has stumped scientists — astronomers in particular are no strangers to confusing phenomena that throw off their results. But streaks and glints are man-made, and opening a dialogue with Musk could be even harder than finding a scientific solution. NASA is already reliant on SpaceX and Starlink for rockets, and a Trump victory in November could take away the little political leverage scientists have against Earth’s worst space landlord.
.jpg){kind=link}