British Columbians were wowed by a series of satellite trains launched into space over the weekend. The slow-moving train of lights surprised many and left many wondering what was flying above them. Reports of the sightings began to trickle in on Saturday night. some inhabitants of BC took to social media to ask if it was a plane, train, UFO or alien. A Vancouver resident captured the lights on August 19 just before 10pm from Vancouver. In the video, a person can be heard saying “I’ve never seen… what could this be? Tell me?” Another person in the video says: “It’s like someone is towing something.” Turns out, nobody towed anything. rather, it was a train of satellites for SpaceX’s Starlink network. SpaceX tweeted about the deployment of 53 satellites on August 19. “The Starlink project operates about 30 to 40 percent of all satellites in low Earth orbit,” says Aaron Boley, associate professor in the department of physics and astronomy at UBC. To maintain this large constellation is why we see these sites … now it’s common enough that people can actually notice this.” Boley explained that the satellites are “packed tight” inside the rockets. after launch, they disperse with very small relative velocities. That’s what causes this chain, Boley told Glacier Media. Over time, this chain expands by design as the satellites are tested to make sure they are functional. “They then ascend to their highest orbit, where they will have their primary mission,” he says.
Traffic congestion and space pollution are top concerns
Boley believes there is a “space traffic management crisis” created by the rapid development of low-Earth orbit. He calls it “unsustainable.” “There’s so much going on out there and it’s all moving so fast. And we have so many different operators, there’s a real possibility that we could have a collision, a major space accident, and that has consequences for everyone,” he says. Debris, even small pieces in space, could cause a satellite to catastrophically fail and disable it, Boley notes. “You can blow it into many other pieces. So debris is a very big issue and with so much material up there, it creates a huge management problem.” Boley works with the International Astronomical Union’s Center for Dark and Quiet Sky Conservation as an astronomer and says these satellites also create the issue of “light pollution.” “We’re actually seeing so many satellites that they’re now interfering with astronomical observations with astrophotography by simply assessing the night sky,” he says. Although the Starlink satellite train will grow dimmer as it rises to its operational altitude, he says it is still visible. “Now there are many satellites strictly in the night sky. It’s hard to go out into a really dark place and be able to see a sky anymore that doesn’t have satellites streaking through it,” says Boley. There are guidelines and rules for launching into space, but they are not uniform around the world, he adds. “Are we going through the right steps to launch it?” Boley questions. “We don’t have a very good commitment, like a debris regime, we don’t have a space traffic management regime, we don’t have then an international understanding of what all the impacts are or how we even deal with all the changes in the upper atmosphere that will happen from that.” Once excited about Starlink, Boley says it’s lost its luster. “I’m not excited about them anymore,” he says. “These trains, to me, are an indication of unsustainable practices, with the large number of satellites that are going up. Some of the issues are that there is real, like real pollution that happens as a result of this from rocket launchers depositing material into the upper atmosphere.” . For now, the risk to people on the ground is very low, he says. But the risk to society of something happening is “non-trivial,” according to Boley.
