non-profit organizations) are largely unaware of the challenges that thousands of new LEO satellites, and associated space debris, could pose to current and future EO satellites.
While intentional and meaningful outreach to these communities has only recently started, questions from them so far have included:
- Who is bearing the burden of costs associated with tracking these many objects, mitigating potential issues, and the loss or reduction of public benefits, if the operations of EO satellites are compromised?
- Will future launches of EO satellites be affected or reduced by more congested LEOs?
- How will cascading collision events, especially with untracked debris, affect the EO satellites we have come to depend on in respect of issues of great environmental importance, such as monitoring pollution and land cover changes affecting people and wildlife?
- What sustainability and carrying capacity studies are being carried out, if any, to ensure the safety and health of the planet’s atmosphere and the equitable access to near-Earth orbits, especially among marginalized communities?
f. Community Engagement Working Group members pointed out that even with sophisticated decommissioning plans in place, individual satellite operators can go, and already have gone, bankrupt, potentially leaving thousands of satellites stranded in orbit, perhaps for thousands of years. This is perhaps analogous to leaving wrecked cars by the side of the highway indefinitely, a practice no modern society accepts.
III. Impacts on the natural and human environment identified or predicted from decommissioning LEO satellites include:
a. Aluminum and rare-earth metals deposited mostly in the atmosphere and the oceans but also on land during re-entry of satellites, either planned or accidental. Boley & Byers (2021) estimate that from the eventual re-entry of the fewer than 2000 Starlink satellites already in orbit as of this writing, the deposition of aluminum into the atmosphere will exceed that from all natural causes, primarily the steady rain of small asteroids and micrometeoroids (roughly 50 tons per day), that Earth collects (e.g., Rojas et al., 2021).
b. The greatly increased likelihood, given the numbers of satellites planned in LEO, of unplanned or uncontrolled re-entries resulting in the direct impact of satellites or satellite fragments with the ground, possibly causing direct injury or loss of life to humans or animals. Residents of the Pacific Northwest got a dramatic demonstration of such a scenario when a SpaceX Falcon 9 made an uncontrolled re-entry into the atmosphere, producing a spectacular fireball witnessed by thousands (Ives, 2021).
The Community Engagement Working Group makes the following recommendations regarding the proven or plausible impacts on the human and natural environment of launching, operating, and decommissioning LEO satellite constellations:
