Elon Musk has spent years promising a rocket that flies as often as an airliner, a radical idea by current aerospace standards. Now, his bombastic tale has a very real, very scary number attached to it: 456.

That’s the number of Starship launches per year SpaceX has asked the Federal Aviation Administration to allow. It’s almost 40% more than all the orbital launch attempts worldwide in 2025—a record year with 329. The scientists who study what rockets and satellites leave behind in the sky think the whole world should be paying attention.

Leonard Schulz, a researcher at the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany, who studies the metals that burned-up spacecraft leave behind, believes the entire planet needs to weigh in on this sudden increase in launches and the massive deployment of satellites that will come with it. “I think this problem should be addressed internationally: limits to the use of space need to be quickly established and adhered to by everyone; we only have one atmosphere,” he said in an email.

SpaceX’s request works out to nearly two launches every weekday. Every single year, Starship alone would fly more than three times the 135 missions NASA’s space shuttles flew in three decades. That’s a lot of rocket engines roaring over a coastline full of people and wildlife. And those satellites Starship will carry by the thousands? They will seed the upper atmosphere with metals whose effects nobody fully understands. And before that, they will crowd low Earth orbit, the band of space a few hundred miles up where most satellites circle the planet, and raise the odds of collisions.

Source link