Elon Musk has set out to become the owner of space – if he is not already – or at least he is the one most willing to get the most economic benefit possible from it. His company SpaceX's rockets are leading the race for a return to the Moon and for a first manned trip to Mars, and are fighting to become the primary means of putting satellites into orbit.
Precisely in this area, Starlink, Musk's company dedicated to offering broadband internet connection via satellite to any part of the world - even in the middle of the ocean - from 29 euros per month, already has constellations orbiting that total between 5,000 and 6,000. minisatellites, which occupy the very low orbit of the Earth, and which represent about half of the 12,000 satellites that currently orbit the Earth. Starlink plans to launch up to 42,000.
Furthermore, the fact of controlling the design and manufacturing of satellites, their launch and marketing is giving it a competitive advantage that – according to other operators in the sector – “is breaking the market.”
Unlike geostationary satellites that orbit the planet at a distance of 35,786 km – approximately one tenth of the distance between the Earth and the Moon – those of Starlink do so at only about 550 km. This has drawbacks and advantages. While with the first three it is enough to cover the entire Earth's surface (and between eight or 20 for those in medium orbit), Musk needs many more, although much smaller, to do the same, and hence it has flooded the sky of satellite constellations. On the other hand, Starlink devices, being closer, offer lower latency, that is, the time it takes for transmissions to arrive from the satellite to Earth and vice versa. While in a geostationary satellite it is more than 600 milliseconds (ms), in Musk's it is only 25 ms. This higher speed allows, for example, to receive streaming services and video games via satellite normally, something that does not happen with geostationary satellites, according to Starlink.
Musk has benefited not only from reduced costs in building and launching satellites, but also from the fact that space is a place where there is very little regulation about what can and cannot be done.
In this sense, space is subject to the provisions of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, whose 1975 Convention on the Registration of Objects in Outer Space, in article 4, requires that every state that launches an object into space registers it with the Secretary General of the UN.
On the other hand, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which also belongs to the United Nations system, has among its powers the distribution of the radio frequency spectrum and satellite orbits.
But it is evident that a paradigm shift has occurred in the exploitation of space. Traditionally, states were the only ones with the technological and financial capacity for such things, especially the US and the Soviet Union. The lowering of costs has meant that the initiative is now progressively passing into the hands of private companies.
Soon, to the tens of thousands of Starlink satellites and the 618 from OneWeb, a space internet service owned by Airbus, we will have to add the first of the Kuiper project that Amazon is preparing – which has hired SpaceX for its launch – and which in the future could reach up to 3,200 satellites in total.
In fact, according to a study that analyzed records that occurred between 2017 and 2022 in the ITU database, more than one million satellite launch proposals have been submitted to low Earth orbit.
“If even a portion of these million satellites are launched, national and international standards will be needed to address associated sustainability issues, such as collision risks, light pollution and re-entry risks,” he said on the Space.com portal. , Andrew Falle, researcher at the Outer Space Institute at the University of British Columbia.
In this sense, the president of Hispasat, Pedro Duque, in a recent interview with La Vanguardia, already stated that “it is obvious that the physical space outside the Earth, at certain altitudes, is a common good of all humanity. It is something whose use must be regulated and probably licensed.”
