October 2021
Congested, contested... under-regulated and unplanned
... not generating revenue, and that repeated switching of components can lead to reliability issues on satellites, but the Starlink engineers will presumably have factored these considerations into their designs. In the case of the Kuiper constellation...
August 2020
Battle for the night sky - from telescopes to ad-breaks
... come under increasing pressure Recently, some have tried to argue that, in ignoring the environmental impact of the Starlink constellation, the FCC acted in contravention of the US National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by not taking into account...
January 2020
Open source space sustainability
... conformity with sustainability standards. The second half of 2019, with the first satellites of the OneWeb and Starlink constellations in orbit, witnessed a burst of new initiatives to define and assess sustainable satellite operations. After nearly...
August 2021
Collision avoidance – time for agreement on space sustainability
... the last four years with the development of the Starlink constellation. Fish swim through a sea of micro plastic...plastics in the world’s oceans. A tongue-in-cheek adaptation of the Starlink Falcon 9 mission patch. Since the early days of the Space ...
January 2021
Safeguarding space - lessons from decommissioning in the energy industry
... have been launched, but this could pale into insignificance with the rise of the constellations: SpaceX’s Starlink, to name but one high profile constellation, may ultimately consist of more than 30,000 spacecraft. Could the...
April 2020
Satellite mega-constellations pose threat to ground-based astronomy
... have been devised without paying enough attention to their potential effects on astronomical observations, and the first Starlink launches made this obvious to professional and amateur astronomers alike. This impact was increased by the impressive...
