A SpaceX proposal to launch up to one million satellites to serve as orbiting AI data centers is drawing fierce backlash from astronomers and atmospheric scientists who warn the project could pump Earth's upper atmosphere full of vaporized spacecraft material, ruin dark skies, and trigger runaway debris collisions.
NBC News first reported the new wave of criticism on July 28, framing it around scientists' fear that the plan would effectively turn the atmosphere into a "fire pit" of vaporized satellites reentering on a near-continuous basis. [1] SpaceX filed the application with the Federal Communications Commission in January, asking to deploy the constellation across altitudes between 500 and 2,000 kilometers which is far higher than its existing Starlink network so the data centers can run continuously on solar power.
Astronomer John Barentine, a dark-sky consultant, warned the satellites "will be in high-inclination orbits and will be fully illuminated by sunlight even as seen from the ground at midnight," threatening both ground-based astronomy and the night sky itself. Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics told Sky & Telescope that each orbital data center would likely be roughly 100 meters tip-to-tip, a "ginormous" structure, and that Musk's plan calls for hourly Starship launches carrying 200 tons each, producing emissions that would outweigh any carbon savings from space-based solar. [2]
A 2025 study found that burning up defunct satellites in the atmosphere releases aluminum oxides and lithium that could prevent the ozone layer from healing. Barentine calculates a spacecraft would be reentering every three minutes at full scale. Aaron Boley of the Outer Space Institute put it bluntly to the CBC: "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".