'This is really intolerable': Astronomers protest giant orbiting mirror project and SpaceX's million AI satellites

SpaceX's One Million Orbital Data Centers Would Be Debilitating for Astronomy Research, Scientists Say

Earlier this week, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, successfully delivering 25 Starlink satellites into orbit. While such launches have become astonishingly commonplace, the company achieved a major milestone that day: getting more than 10,000 active Starlink satellites orbiting the Earth at one time, according to data compiled by Harvard astronomer Jonathan McDowell. The extent of SpaceX’s me…

A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky — for everyone on Earth

A Starlink train passing through auroras over rural Saskatchewan in November 2025. (Samantha Lawler), CC BY-NC-NDMore than 10,000 Starlink satellites currently orbit the Earth. We see them crawling across dark skies, no matter how remote our location, and streaking through images from research telescopes. SpaceX recently announced that it wants to launch one million more of these satellites as orbital data centres for AI computing power. A few y…

'This is really intolerable': Astronomers protest giant orbiting mirror project and SpaceX's million AI satellites

Proposed constellations of orbiting mirrors and data centers would completely destroy the night sky as humanity has known it for millions of years, experts say.