The night sky has never been a protected resource. It has always been treated as a backdrop, freely available and infinitely renewable. Elon Musk-backed SpaceX's latest filing with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission is testing that assumption in the most direct way yet.
On January 30, 2026, SpaceX filed with the FCC to launch one million satellites into Earth's orbit. The proposal frames them as orbital AI data centres, computing infrastructure in space, designed to meet surging demand for artificial intelligence processing without the terrestrial footprint of land-based server farms. The FCC accepted the filing and opened a public comment period within four days.
The scientific community's response has been close to unanimous alarm.
More satellites than stars
The human eye can detect roughly 4,500 stars in an unpolluted night sky. Astronomers at the University of Regina and the University of British Columbia ran simulations of what SpaceX's proposed constellation would look like from latitude 50 degrees north at midnight on the summer solstice. Their finding: for large portions of the night and the year, there would be more visible satellites than stars, throughout the world.
"It is hard to overstate this," the researchers wrote. "Should a million new satellites be launched, in the orbits and with the sizes proposed, the stars we are able to see at night would be completely overwhelmed by artificial satellites."
For context, SpaceX currently operates more than 10,000 Starlink satellites, which in itself is a number that already streaks through astrophotography and research telescope images on a routine basis. The proposed million-satellite constellation would be 80 times larger than the entire current active satellite population of roughly 12,000.
The proposed orbital data centres would fly at higher altitudes than standard Starlink satellites, making them visible for longer periods of the night. Simulations predict tens of thousands of sunlit satellites in the sky simultaneously at certain times of year.
There will be consequences
The Very Large Telescope in Chile would lose up to 10% of pixels in every image if the constellation materialises, rising to 30% for some observation types. A study published in Nature found that if roughly half a million satellites were in orbit, at least one would contaminate essentially every observation taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
"That's a huge loss," said Olivier Hainaut, an astronomer who reviewed the projections. "We keep our technical losses below 3%, and the total weather losses are about 10%."
Aaron Boley, co-director of the Outer Space Institute at the University of British Columbia, said the proposal "blows right past" any reasonable assessment of safe orbital capacity. "By almost all metrics that we can think of, this is just a bad idea in terms of our long-term use and access to space."
The astronomers' frustration carries an additional sting. SpaceX has spent years working with the International Astronomical Union to reduce the brightness of Starlink satellites. That goodwill, built over careful negotiation, appears to have been set aside entirely. "It feels like a slap in the face," one researcher said.
Tragedy waiting to happen?
Light pollution is the most visible problem. It is not the only one.
Each satellite, weighing approximately 550 pounds, releases roughly 70 pounds of aluminum oxide into the stratosphere when it de-orbits and burns up. Scaled to the replacement rate a million-satellite constellation would require, estimated at up to 10 Starship launches per day to maintain, the atmospheric chemistry implications are uncharted and unreviewed.
Atmospheric scientist Eloise Marais has described the situation plainly: "It's daunting because we're doing this sort of experiment with the atmosphere when we don't really know what the result will be." The FCC's standard environmental review process was not applied to SpaceX's filing.
The orbital debris risk compounds this. Over 140 million debris pieces already orbit Earth. At collision speeds of 17,500 miles per hour, a single impact can generate thousands of new fragments. Adding a million active satellites does not simply add a million collision risks, it multiplies them across every existing object in orbit.
SpaceX is not alone. China has filed to launch 200,000 satellites for its own network. Amazon and Blue Origin each plan thousands more. The cumulative picture is of a finite orbital commons being partitioned by a small number of private and state actors without binding international governance.
Robert Massey, deputy executive director of the Royal Astronomical Society, called the situation "absolutely the destruction of a central part of human heritage." He added: "This is really intolerable."
The FCC has accepted SpaceX's filing. It has not been approved. Public comments were open through early March 2026. What happens next will determine whether the night sky, which has oriented human navigation, religion, art, and science since before recorded history, remains what it has always been or becomes something else: a grid.
