The Artificial Sky

When astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell saw a train of lights marching across the darkness, he knew the night sky had changed forever.

[Speaker 1]: It was May 2019. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center, was doing what he usually does-looking at data from space. And then he saw something that made him stop. He actually said later, quote, "Holy [expletive]." [Speaker 2]: It wasn't a comet. It wasn't an asteroid. It was a train of sixty bright lights, marching in a perfect straight line across the night sky. [Speaker 1]: It looked fake. Like something out of a bad sci-fi movie. But it was the first batch of Starlink satellites. [Speaker 2]: McDowell realized in that exact moment that the night sky had fundamentally changed. For all of human history, looking up meant looking at nature. Stars, planets, the moon. But after that launch? Looking up meant looking at infrastructure. [Speaker 1]: That was just sixty satellites. Today, there are more than six thousand of them up there. It is the largest satellite constellation in history, by a massive margin. [Speaker 2]: And we are just getting started. The plan is for forty-two thousand. [Speaker 1]: Which forces us to ask a question that feels a little urgent right now. We know they bring internet. We know they’re controversial. But how do you actually manage a traffic jam moving at seventeen thousand miles an hour? How do they not crash into each other? And what happens when the "train" becomes a "shell" that covers the entire Earth? [Speaker 2]: Today, we are looking at the engineering marvel, and the existential risk, of Starlink. [Speaker 1]: Let’s figure this out. [Speaker 2]: To understand why this is happening now, and not twenty years ago, you have to look at the graveyard. Because Starlink isn't a new idea. [Speaker 1]: Right, Bill Gates tried this, didn’t he? [Speaker 2]: He did. Back in the nineties, Gates and a cellular pioneer named Craig McCaw backed a project called Teledesic. The plan was almost identical: hundreds of satellites in Low Earth Orbit, beaming broadband down to Earth. It was incredibly ambitious. And it collapsed completely in 2002. [Speaker 1]: Why? Was the technology just not ready? [Speaker 2]: It was physics, but mostly it was economics. This is the first thing you have to understand about the "how" of Starlink. In the nineties, building a satellite was like building a Ferrari. You built it by hand, it took years, and it cost millions. And then, you put it on a rocket that you flew once and then crashed into the ocean. [Speaker 1]: The throw-away rocket. [Speaker 2]: Exactly. The math just didn't work. The capital expenditure-the Capex-killed them before they could get the network up. SpaceX solved the launch problem first. By landing the Falcon 9 boosters and reusing them, they slashed the internal cost of getting to orbit. [Speaker 1]: Okay, so the bus to space got cheaper. [Speaker 2]: Much cheaper. But they also changed the passenger. Traditional satellites are heavy, bespoke machines. Starlink satellites are... well, they're flat-packed IKEA furniture. [Speaker 1]: [Laughs] That’s a humbling comparison. [Speaker 2]: It’s accurate, though. They are manufactured on an assembly line, which was unheard of. They are flat panels, roughly the size of a dining room table. They stack them flat inside the nose cone of the rocket, sixty at a time. No wasted space. [Speaker 1]: So we have cheap rockets and mass-produced satellites. That explains the volume. But I want to get into the machine itself. Because if you’re floating in space, three hundred miles up, how are you actually working? How do you get power? [Speaker 2]: That’s the…