An almost perfectly aligned row of luminous objects moving in the same direction in the sky. From various parts of Mexico and the United States, users photographed and published on social networks what appeared to be a new sign of life in space. In a way it is, although those objects are not aliens .
This is a fleet of 60 satellites that was put into orbit by the SpaceX company with the launch of its Falcon 9 rocket in the early hours of Tuesday, from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The mission is called Starlink and is one of the most ambitious of the Elon Musk company and it will have direct effects on all the inhabitants of the world. The purpose of SpaceX is to have a network of 42,000 satellites in orbit that will form a global system to deliver broadband Internet to the most remote corners of the planet.
After three launches (two last year and this Tuesday), there are 180 satellites forming this network. Some of them can be seen with the naked eye in the next few days, while they orbit the Earth about 180 miles high.
The heavens-above.com website allows you to see the orbits on a dynamic map. Through the Track Starlink Satellites site it is possible to know the day and time when the satellite fleet will pass over a specific point on the planet. In Miami they can be seen this Thursday minutes before 20 hours, looking to the Southwest. In Mexico City it will be seen closer to 8:30 p.m., looking west.
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Internet for everyone
The satellites, flat and compact and weighing only 575 pounds, were launched with the Falcon 9 reusable rocket, which after completing the first stage returned to Earth to land vertically on the platform Of course I still love you , who was waiting for him in the Atlantic Ocean.
The devices were left in a low orbit for testing before using their own rockets to reach new orbits about 340 miles from Earth, and joining the 120 satellites launched in May and November 2019.
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The Starlink mission aims to establish a gigantic satellite network that will deliver "fast and reliable Internet connection to locations where access has not been reliable, is expensive or completely unavailable, " according to a statement delivered by SpaceX.
Billionaire Elon Musk, who runs SpaceX and is also executive director of the electric car manufacturer Tesla, is not the only one behind the mission of delivering the Internet globally. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, heads the Kuiper Project , which aims to launch more than 3,200 satellites for the same purpose. And Richard Branson, founder of Virgin, is one of the main investors of OneWeb , another satellite Internet project.
Annoyance among astronomers
But not everything has been simple for Elon Musk and SpaceX. Although its purpose is to connect all people here on Earth, among astronomers it has caused outrage that the skies of bright devices must be filled for that.
The company had to commit to professionals to reduce the luminosity reflected by satellites and that hinders the tasks of observing the sky from Earth. In a first step in this regard, one of the 60 satellites launched this Tuesday has a dark coating that will study how to reduce the light that the devices reflect towards the planet.
Jeff Hall, director of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, said that for now Starlink devices have been only an occasional problem, but warned that the risk will grow as the network expands and other companies launch their own fleets.
Hall heads the committee on light pollution, space debris and radio interference from the Astronomical Society of the United States and works with SpaceX on solutions to this problem.
There are currently about 2,100 active satellites in orbit around our planet, according to the Satellite Industry Association.
With satellite Internet projects it is estimated that 46,000 satellites will be put into orbit in the coming years. That is more than five times the total number of artifacts sent to space in the last 60 years, totaling 9,000 artifacts, according to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs.
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