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Samantha Lawler, Associate Professor, Astronomy, University of Regina

A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky — for everyone on Earth

A Starlink train passing through auroras over rural Saskatchewan in November 2025. (Samantha Lawler), CC BY-NC-ND

More than 10,000 Starlink satellites currently orbit the Earth. We see them crawling across dark skies, no matter how remote our location, and streaking through images from research telescopes.

SpaceX recently announced that it wants to launch one million more of these satellites as orbital data centres for AI computing power.

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