The aspirations of humanity have long exceeded the limits of our delicate balance with nature, from our expanding industrial power to our loss of the seas. In recent years, our ambitions have extended seriously to heaven, threatening to contaminate the space itself never seen before. Now, a new hardware lot that is reaching the orbit, a battery of two satellites from the Amazon delivery giant that are designed to send the Internet to the earth from space, stands out once the challenge faces the civilization of Aur. While shaking the needs of a growing technological poppy in the soil, large satellite constellations such as Amazon’s risk, a fundamental alteration of the appearance and usability of the night sky, we still do not have solutions.
On April 28 at 7:01 PM EDT, an Atlas V rocket rose from Cape Canaveral, Fla. On board, it took the first 27 satellites of 3,200 Amazon planned, founded by Jeff Bezos: the beginning of a large satellite collection and is known as a mega constellation, known as Project Kuiper. The objective of these satellites, which is now directed to orbit, is to transmit the Internet to users in remote locations away from the terrestrial infrastructure, as in rural areas or in airplanes.
But Amazon is not alone. Spacex, under its CEO Elon Musk, has already launched more than 7000 flat car wide satellites in its Starlink constellation and plans to add about 30,000 more. The company has more than 5 million customers worldwide, with monthly subscription costs for residential plans ranging from $ 80 to $ 120 in users must also disburse $ 349 for a plate-FI network to satellites. Ten. A. Ten. AAAAAA TEN. Aaaaaaa ten. Ten. Aa ten. Aa ten. A. Ten. A. Ten. Ten. That is equivalent to the income of hundreds of millions of dollars for months, with the potential of billions of dollars as the service and the number of increase of users expand. And it is a portion of this cake that Amazon hopes to grab.
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The reports suggest that Project Kuiper could cost Amazon up to $ 20 billion to build. “Amazon would be investing the best part of $ 20 billion unless they receive a billionaire opportunity,” says Tim Farrar, an expert in satellite communications in California. In fact, the Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy, has previously talked about Project Kuiper becoming the company’s “fourth pillar” along with its online market, web cloud services and Amazon Prime subscriptions.
To compete with Starlink, Amazon plans to launch quickly. The company has bought Space Ondozen of Rockets, including Falcon 9 of Spacex, to quickly bring its hardware to space. The need for speed is not only by Spacex: as part of the Amazon license with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to operate its satellites in space, the company must launch half of its planned constellation of 3,200 satellites in July 2026 and the Remintitas license.
Starlink has drastically changed the environment around the earth. When the first Starlink satellites were launched in May 2019, there were barely 2,000 active satellites in space. Today there are more than 11000. Most of these are Starlink satellites, but the figure also includes 648 satellites that provide to the Internet service Oneweb Space of the Eutelsat company and 72 satellites of a growing Chinese spatial constellation called Qianfan, which may be possible. This growing number of satellites grows rapidly on how we handle all these objects. “Every day is an unprecedented territory,” says Hugh Lewis, an expert in space debris at Southampton University in England.
Project Kuiper is designed to orbit slightly above Starlink, at an altitude of approximately 370 to 390 miles (590 to 630 kilometers), compared to the 340 miles of Starlink (550 km). The satellites of both constellations are designed to constantly recover as they fail or reach the end of their life, and Spacex currently launched Starlink satellites in lots several times a month. That means that there will be Kuiper satellites crossing with Starlink satellites while traveling up and down, with a significant potential for chaos.
All satellites in the current Starlink constellation combined perform approximately 50,000 collision avoidance maneuvers every six months, according to Spacex. In these cases, a Starlink satellite, which is considered to pass sufficiently close to another object, is in orbit that a collision could be possible, which leads to the satellite to perform an automated navigation away from the object using its propellants. Amazon has not announced its own automated system, and Neith that company or Spacex responded to a request for comments from American scientist. However, never, with the introduction of the Kuiper project and other mega constellations, the number of close approaches in all satellites could grow to the “tens or even sinks of millions” per year, says Lewis. “Ultimately, one of those will be bitten by one of those.”
The collision of two satellites would be a disaster. In 2009, the Iridium 33 satellite of the United States collided with the disappeared Russian satellite Kosmos 2251, producing thousands of pieces of debris, some of which will orbit the earth for 100 years. The greatest danger of another collision is that the resulting debris could cause more collisions as more and more satellites are hit. “It won’t be like Wall · e,“Says Victoria Samson, head of the security and stability of space in the Secure World Foundation, a non -profit organization of Space sustainability, which refers to a 2008 pixar film in which a future land has been chained by space.
The efforts to introduce regulation to supervise this rapid growth in satellites have been slow. There are currently no formal international laws or organizations to monitor or control the number of satellites in orbit. We are “at all” ready for the arrival of so many satellites, says Michelle Hanlon, space lawyer at Mississippi University. “We can agree on anything in the international community. We should have a space corridor or space arbitration, so in ATE we get all space problems in a jurisdiction. We have nothing.” “There will be a break point,” she says, and a real collision may be necessary to stimulate significant action.
And then there is the problem of astronomy. For years, astronomers have leadership with the Starlink effect on their observations in the universe. The numerous satellites of the mega constellation appear as constant bright stripes in images of telescopes on earth and even some in space. Samantha Lawler, astronomer from the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, says that many of his images are tarnished by satellites that cross their vision plane. “It seems horrible to me,” she says. “All disadvantages are going on, and there is still no regulation.”
Bright satellite stripes can hinder scientific discovery because sometimes interesting study objects behind them, such as asteroids, planets and stars. They can also alter the natural aesthetics of the night sky. “One of the main recommendations of the IAU [International Astronomical Union] is to keep the satellites under [a brightness of] Magnitude 7 “, says Olivier Hainaut, an astronomer at the European Observatory of the South in Germany.” That means you don’t see them with the naked eye. “A telescope that could be particularly affected is the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a new telescope built in the mountains of Chile with a huge camera that will imagine the entire sky once it begins later stuns. By hindering its science.
Spacex has had a moderately successful success in mitigating Starlink satellites by applying a dark coating or using a sumhade to reduce the amount of sunlight that they reflect to the ground, but other satellites such as those of China’s qianfan even brighter. “Those are very worrying,” says Lawler. And only astronomy radio can be affected by incoming satellite signals. Astronomer problems are increasing, without an obvious solution in sight. “Five years ago we lived in the wonderful ignorance,” says Hainaut.
The final brightness of Kuiper’s satellites won clearly up to a few weeks after this first launch, when the bone has increased to their operational altitude. By then, we could have seen the next launch of Kuiper, followed by the next and next. Providing broad and extended Internet from space in our modern digital world is a digital objective that can benefit many people on the planet. But as our cosmic infrastructure grows without any clear rule of the road, so does the disaster potential. “At some point, we have to stop launching thesis constellations,” says Hanlon, either until those rules turn or the sausage occurs, and two satellites collide. “I hope we discover it.”
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