"Around 14,500 active satellites are circling Earth, and roughly two-thirds of them are run by SpaceX. Now, in filings connected to Elon Musk's plan to fold SpaceX and his AI firm xAI together ahead of an IPO, the company has asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for permission to launch up to one million more. The figure is so large it would dwarf the number of satellites currently in orbit."
"In a public update posted on the SpaceX website as part of the merger process between SpaceX and xAI, Musk wrote that "Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization." The Kardashev scale is a measure of technological development first outlined in the 1960s by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev, who died in 2019."
"A million new satellites would represent roughly a 67-fold increase over today's orbital population. "Proposals on the scale being discussed-up to one million satellites-represent a step change that deserves the same level of scrutiny we would apply to any other major global infrastructure project," says Ruskin Hartley, CEO of DarkSky International, a nonprofit focused on preserving night skies and mitigating the impacts of light pollution."
Low Earth orbit holds about 14,500 active satellites, roughly two-thirds operated by SpaceX. Filings connected to a plan to fold SpaceX and the AI firm xAI together ahead of an IPO request FCC permission to launch up to one million additional satellites. That number would dwarf the current orbital population and exceed every object ever launched into space by every nation. The proposal frames the satellites as orbital data centers and a step toward a Kardashev II-level civilization. Experts warn the scale would demand rigorous scrutiny and could cause night-sky degradation, increased atmospheric pollution, severe orbital congestion, and collision cascades that restrict access to LEO.
Read at Fast Company
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