SpaceX Versus the Astronomers: Starlink In the Telescope Crosshairs

 

Elon Musk, who no one has accused of being shy and retiring in his corporate ventures, is engaged in deploying what he hopes will be some 40,000 low-earth-orbit satellites to form what he calls a Starlink system to provide internet service to underserved areas of the globe, and also presumably to make money.  So far, several thousand of the mass-produced satellites have been launched in batches of dozens at a time, although a recent geomagnetic storm caused an early demise for some of the newest ones as the resulting denser atmosphere at their orbital heights dragged them to a fiery death.

 

The satellites are comparatively small—about 500 pounds (220 kg) and about the size of a table—and burn up completely when they de-orbit, so we don't have to worry about pieces of them falling on our heads.  But the folks who are worried about the ones staying in orbit are astronomers, who are already seeing little bright Starlink satellite dots streak through their telescope fields of view, especially when they try to observe close to the horizon near dusk or dawn.

 

For some time now, the astronomers have been trying to garner attention for their plight, which only promises to get worse as other commercial space firms compete with SpaceX, Musk's company, to gain low-earth-orbit communications satellite market share.  Last week, the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a sort of United Nations of astronomy, announced the organization of the Center for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Skies from Satellite Constellation Interference.  For once, the name of the new organization doesn't form a cute acronym, which perhaps bespeaks the seriousness of the endeavor.

 

The reason they call it both dark and quiet is that communications satellites, by nature, emit electromagnetic waves, usually in the microwave radio spectrum.  And although astronomers are provided with protected bits of the electromagnetic spectrum in which no radio emissions are allowed, these tend to be fairly narrow slices surrounded by wide bands where communications-related emissions are permitted.  Radiotelescopes use the most sensitive and delicate radio receivers on the planet, and they are not designed to reject nearby out-of-band interference very well.  If one of the Starlink satellites happens to sweep through the narrow beam of a radiotelescope, the satellite's emissions are likely to mess up the astronomy receiver in an unpredictable way.

 

And of course, visible-light telescopes pick up the Starlink satellites easily, even if the satellites are painted black.  One recent report in The Independent (UK) says that astronomers are seeing their visible-light exposures messed up with Starlink tracks an average of once every ten days.

 

So far, the problem is at a manageable annoyance level.  But multiply it by ten or more, and just the Starlink satellites will interfere seriously with a lot of astronomical projects, including the search for killer meteorites that might bring a premature end, not only to Starlink, but to everybody who could use it as well. 

 

It's an interesting problem in engineering ethics, if you want to view the situation through that lens.  In this corner, you have the public that would presumably like Internet access but lives too remotely for it now, and SpaceX wanting to provide that service with Starlink.  And in that corner, you have the IAU saying that what Starlink and similar firms are doing could raise havoc with a large portion of their activities.  

 

Historically, when you have a conflict between an entire industry and another popular institution such as astronomy, a third party such as government or an international organization has to get involved.  This is the way that radioastronomers obtained their reserved slices of the electromagnetic spectrum, by pleading with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) for them and making effective arguments, possibly together with a little political diplomacy. 

 

Now that the commercialization of space has been going on for at least a couple of decades, we are seeing the kinds of conflicts that led to the formation in former years of the ITU for radio.  Although nobody "owns" the low-earth-orbit region of space in an exclusionary sense ("this is my two quadrillion cubic meters and you can't send your satellite into it"), it is clearly a limited resource, just like the electromagnetic spectrum, and we are now seeing an increasing need for some kind of global regulatory body to adjudicate issues such as the one that has arisen between SpaceX and the astronomers, represented by the IAU.

 

Something similar came about when transoceanic flights became routine and different countries had to arrange for protocols of using flight routes and standards for international airports.  The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), whose present embodiment dates back to 1947, arose as a part of the United Nations to perform these duties. 

 

The UN currently has a couple of branches dealing with space: the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs and a registry of objects launched into orbit.  But neither of these outfits appears to have the regulatory clout needed to deal with disputes between a brash private firm bent on networking the Earth with 40,000 satellites, and a bunch of scientists who have little money for lobbying and whose main argument is that if you clutter up our telescopes too much, there's a teeny little chance that we'll miss seeing a meteor that will creep up on us and destroy civilization.

 

So far, the astronomers are just having to deal with the problems that Starlink causes them on a case-by-case basis.  And ultimately, it's quite possible that most cutting-edge observational astronomy will move to outer space anyway, as the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope promises to beat anything you can do with earth-based telescopes.  As a global culture, we may find that turning the night skies into shimmering collections of satellites and ruining them for astronomy is a reasonable price to pay for letting the most remote tribe in the world livestream SuperBowl C (100, if you're rusty on your Roman numerals).  But if that happens, I think we will have lost something that will be hard to get back.

 

Sources:  I referred to a report on The Independent's webpage at https://www.independent.co.uk/space/astronomers-elon-musk-satellites-asteroids-b2009163.html, a BBC report at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-60317806 about satellites lost to a geomagnetic storm, and the Wikipedia articles on the ICAO and the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs. 

ICAO To Airlines: Watch Where You're Going (Every 15 Minutes)

Once in a great while, I have the satisfaction of making a prediction or calling for a certain action in this blog, and then seeing the called-for event actually come to pass.  Last month, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) issued a new set of tracking requirements for airlines in participating countries, which means just about every airline that flies in more than one country.  While a formal vote on the requirements won't happen till later in the year, the slow-moving machinery of the United Nations—of which the ICAO is a part—has finally creaked into action.  So it may not be too much to hope that the kind of situation that has kept the destiny of Malaysia Flight 370 a mystery to this day can be avoided in the future, or at least that such incidents will produce data that will make the plane easier to find.

Flight 370, which disappeared a year ago March 8, was supposed to stay within range of ground-based tracking radars.  But when it veered way off course toward the open ocean for reasons that are still unknown, the limited-range ground radars lost contact with it, and an onboard satellite-tracking system was not working, possibly because it was intentionally disabled.  The upshot was that once the flight disappeared, investigators had to use some arcane technical tricks to estimate the flight's last known location, and the resulting poor accuracy and long gaps between known locations have left searchers stuck with many thousands of square miles of ocean to cover.  The plane may never be found.

Back in January, I blogged on this tragedy and noted that the U. S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) was urging the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to adopt improved flight-location technology.  I also noted that while this move would help us to find international flights operated by US carriers, a truly international solution would have to await action by the ICAO, which has now begun to act.

As reported in a recent Associated Press article, the ICAO rules would require each airline to get location updates for all their flights every 15 minutes.  How they get the updates is up to the airlines.  Deep-pocketed operations such as Air France already have automatic satellite-location systems in place, and probably either already meet the requirements or can change their operations slightly to comply.  Less well-funded airlines can fall back on having their pilots look at their pocket GPS they mail-ordered from Walmart and use their shortwave radios to report their position.  Any way will do, says the ICAO, but you have to update your flight locations every 15 minutes.  If the rules are approved, this requirement will go into effect in 2016, which is by UN standards almost instantaneously. 

A second part of the ruling pertains to automatic flight-location technology, typically a satellite link.  By 2020, all new airplanes carrying more than 19 passengers will have to go into a minute-by-minute location transmission mode if an emergency occurs such as a steep dive or significant deviation from the flight plan.  The five-year delay from now would give airframe manufacturers and their customers time to ready the technology and the money to pay for it, respectively. 

By specifying in the 15-minute rule the desired outcome rather than the technology required to achieve it, the ICAO has done a clever thing.  Each airline can tailor its response to its own circumstances and adopt an approach that doesn't place an undue burden either on the flight crew or on the airline's budget for new equipment.  For reasons that are not clear, but may have to do with relationships between large avionics companies and the federal government, FAA rules tend to be much more prescriptive of exactly how certain goals are to be achieved technologically.  Historically, the FAA owned and operated much of the technology itself, so naturally the agency got in the habit of telling the airlines what matching equipment they needed.  But nowadays, the central-control model is pretty old-fashioned and is being superseded by distributed technologies that rely upon a combination of public, private, and open-source resources to work.  Safety-critical technologies are a breed apart, and a certain level of standardization and certification is reasonable.  But I wonder if things might move a little faster in domestic aviation technology if the FAA took a hint from the ICAO, and moved toward simply telling airlines what is to be achieved, and let the firms themselves figure out how to achieve it.

All this comes too late to help those on the ill-fated Flight 370, which is probably—but not for sure—somewhere at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.  The death of a loved one is always a tragedy, but there must be a special pain associated with not knowing anything about the person's final hours, and what mischance caused their demise.  Sooner or later, someone will probably find the wreckage, and if enough evidence can be recovered it may be possible to reconstruct what happened.  But in the meantime, I hope that the proposed new ICAO rules will make it much less likely that airlines will simply lose track of a plane while someone runs off with it, and can even prevent such incidents from occurring in the future.

Sources:  The article "Airlines move to better track their planes" by Scott Meyerowitz and David Koenig was carried by numerous newspapers, including the Deseret News on Mar. 3, 2015 at http://www.deseretnews.com/article/765669470/Airlines-move-to-better-track-planes-a-year-after-Flight-370.html.  My post "High Time for SatelliteTracking of All International Flights" appeared on Jan. 26, 2015.