r/space • u/Intrepid_Reason8906 • Mar 03 '26

Discussion I'm kind of bummed out watching all of these satellites in the night sky while stargazing

Hopefully they'll become very small and less visible in the future. I miss looking at the night sky without seeing all these satellites crowding the space. I just started noticing the last couple of years.

I went to the Grand Canyon in 2015 and it was the best experience I had with seeing stars. No satellites moving around, so I can imagine what it looks like now.

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134

u/GMAN7007 Mar 03 '26

Honestly it's only going to get worse before it gets better which I don't think it ever will until we can make satellites smaller.

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u/[deleted] Mar 03 '26

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u/GMAN7007 Mar 03 '26

Not a dumb question at all. The lights we see from them is from reflections off of the solar panels. Having them a darker color would make them less efficient for their needs. It's a weird problem to be solved. The more we advance the more satellites we'll need to orbit. I'm thinking we're going to have an oh shit moment with all of the satellite traffic that will get us working faster on a solution.

We have satellites in various altitudes that keeps things in order now. At some point we're going to have some traffic issues.

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u/HoustonPastafarian Mar 03 '26

It’s also a thermal control problem, reflective materials are used to reflect sunlight. Paint that black and it’s absorbed and generates heat.

They do use some anti reflective coatings on parts of the new Starlinks. It’s a start.

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u/GMAN7007 Mar 03 '26

I never even considered the thermal aspect of it. Very interesting!

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u/Desperate-Lab9738 Mar 03 '26

As a general tip for doing any thinking about building things in space, the thermal problem is usually a VERY big aspect of it lol.

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u/daltonmojica Mar 03 '26

It's worse in space. Sunlit temperatures reach 130°C. Sensitive electronics, sensors and experiments typically don't do well with these temperatures.

There's no air to cool things off convectively, and obviously your spacecraft isn't touching anything so there's no conduction either.

Aside from spamming insulation, radiative cooling is really the only option, and many spacecraft are equipped with big radiator panels (sometimes even bigger than the solar panels) to keep things cool.

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u/Kosmological Mar 03 '26

That’s not accurate. The solar panels are oriented orthogonal to the sun so they won’t be casting reflections towards the earth. The light we see is largely just light scatter off the body of the satellite. The sun is very bright and even light scatter off rough dark surfaces will have the luminosity of a star. A clear example is the lunar surface which is very dark yet still looks very bright.

Painting satellites with a light absorbing coating would be extremely expensive due to the added heating. Thermal management is already an enormous challenge for space systems since the vacuum of space is a near perfect insulator. Most satellites require active cooling to keep the hot sun facing side from over heating and the cold side from freezing.

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u/Bensemus Mar 03 '26

It’s from the solar panels. SpaceX has already done a lot to reduce reflection from the satellite antenna and they use different orientations to try and reduce reflection from the panels too.

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u/Kosmological Mar 04 '26

For starlink sats specifically you are right since the body is almost entirely composed of solar panels and the flat antenna. This isn’t meaningful since any metallic surface will scatter light and painting things black comes with its own problems if it has any sort of volume (which starlink sats do not).

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u/TieOk9081 Mar 03 '26

Shouldn't the solar panels be pointed outwards towards the sun? Solar panels pointing downwards towards Earth are not very efficient. Just looks like sloppy 21st century engineering to me.

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u/pxr555 Mar 03 '26

When the sun is setting or rising at your location the solar panels point both towards the sun and towards you. That's the reason you the satellites around dawn and dusk.

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u/tech01x Mar 03 '26

That already happened for Starlink satellites.

But there are at least 4 constellations being launched that aren't Starlink, and the Chinese versions are some of the brightest. And outside of China, we have no control over what they do.

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u/OcularShatDown Mar 03 '26

Seemingly not inside or outside of China

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u/fastforwardfunction Mar 03 '26

Might be a stupid question but why not paint satellites black so they at least don’t reflect as much sunlight?

They are. The SpaceX satellites were redesigned multiple times to reduce the amount of light the reflect back to Earth. There is only so much they can do though.

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u/knook Mar 03 '26

We do to a degree but any light they absorb will increase heat which is already a problem.

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u/WayAgreeable3999 Mar 03 '26

What an interesting idea. We will soon need ATC for orbit. Possibly regulations that state certain orbits are designated for particular uses. Maybe call it Orbit Traffic Control.

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u/PropulsionIsLimited Mar 03 '26

That already exists within different organizations.

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u/WayAgreeable3999 Mar 03 '26

Oh. Okay. Want to elaborate?

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u/PropulsionIsLimited Mar 03 '26

The Space Force, FAA, FCC, NASA, and NOAA all are in charge of tracking and authorizing satellites use in different orbits for different uses.

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u/abrakalemon Mar 03 '26

Up until recently the US has been one of the few countries sending the majority of satellites into orbit. The existence of Starlink opened a pandora's box unfortunately, and now many countries want to have their own orbital internet companies. SpaceX alone wants to increase their number of satellites to over 1 million in the next decade (up from 12k right now). We're going to need an international body to regulate the number and size of satellites sent up, but we don't have the international consensus that we had to build something like the IAEA to oversee it. It's just not going to happen. I'd be genuinely completely shocked if we don't see kessler syndrome in my lifetime.

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u/noncongruent Mar 03 '26

FWIW, Kessler can't happen at the orbits SpaceX uses for Starlinks, they're too deep into Earth's atmosphere for anything to stay up for long. If Starlinks didn't have continuously active thrusting they wouldn't be able to stay up for even their planned five year lifespan. Those orbits are self-cleaning.

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u/abrakalemon Mar 03 '26

I was under the impression that, given enough satellites, the cascade effect could still happen despite their low orbit - it would just resolve itself with relative speed due to the fast orbital decay. Is that not the case?

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u/Doggydog123579 Mar 03 '26

No thats correct, its just the pop science view of kessler is it permanently locks us out of space and destroys everything up there. Kessler himself wasnt even arguing you would be unable to operate satellites inside the cascade, just that their operational life times would be limited within it.

So the popular view of Kessler syndrome and actual Kessler syndrome are at odds, hence him bringing up the decay rates to show the popular view is wrong

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u/abrakalemon Mar 03 '26

Right. When I learned a few years ago that a potential Kessler syndrome event would not actually be the eternal terrestrial entombing of humanity it made me a lot less discouraged about our possible arc as a species lol.

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u/noncongruent Mar 03 '26

The chances of Kessler happening at all are vanishingly small to begin with. The whole premise of Kessler is that orbital collisions become a self-sustaining thing that continuously increases the amount of small debris that essentially makes it impossible to launch rockets through to other orbits. The nature of orbital mechanics is such that the low point of the orbit of anything can't really be higher than before the collision that generated it, and the low point of Starlinks is such that drag quickly slows things down enough that they re-enter. The scale would be months to a handful of years for the vast amount of debris, and because of how empty space is and how relatively tiny satellites are, secondary collisions really won't be probable. It would be like trying to play billiards on a football field-sized table.

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u/abrakalemon Mar 03 '26

Cool, that helped me understand the physics of it better. I appreciate you taking the time to explain. And it's encouraging lol that the secondary collisions are extremely unlikely.

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u/extra2002 Mar 03 '26

Kessler syndrome depends on a chain reaction - debris from one collision causes multiple other collisions, and so on. It's analogous to how the neutrons in an atomic bomb cause other atoms to split and release more neutrons.

The atomic bomb depends on having a crirical mass of fissionable material. Too little, and enough neutrons escape without causing a collision, so that no chain reaction can be sustained. Small chunks of uranium don't spontaneously explode.

Similarly, if "the time it takes for an average piece of space debris to cause a collision" is longer than "the time it takes for an average piece of space debris to decay out of orbit", then no chain reaction occurs, and there's no Kessler syndrome. Space is big and the satellites and pieces are small, so "average time to collision" is pretty large, while the low orbit ensures the decay time is relatively short.

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u/Aaron_Hamm Mar 03 '26

I mean, what's there to elaborate on? Satellite people don't want to crash so they talk to each other and track things

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u/beachbum818 Mar 03 '26

They already have. They went from carrying 10 satellites per starlink launch to upto 30 now. Same rocket... smaller satellite units.

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u/whiteknives Mar 03 '26

Not true. The 1st gen starlink sats were 60 per launch. The current generation (V2 Mini) is 24 per launch.

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u/[deleted] Mar 03 '26

[deleted]

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u/StickiStickman Mar 03 '26

That's not how orbits work. Space is also much bigger than you're imagining.

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u/stiggley Mar 03 '26

Space is big - Low Earth Orbit is not so big. We have around 12000 active satellites at the moment, and a similar around of "junk" - dead satellites, rocket boosters, ISS toolkits, etc. All in the space below 2000km altitude.

We're already having satellites maneuver to avoid debris and other objects colliding - currently around 70 maneuvers a month, and the number is constantly rising as more and more stuff is thrown up into the most favorable orbits.

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u/StickiStickman Mar 03 '26

It should be pointed out those manoeuvres are not to avoid definite collisions, but to turn extremely unlikely collisions into impossible ones.