In 2024, several farmers across Saskatchewan, Canada, had to deal with a bizarre situation: chunks of SpaceX space junk had crashed onto their land. As I helped a couple of these farmers negotiate the wild world of international space law, not significantly updated since the Apollo era, I knew this situation would become increasingly common.
The first generation of megaconstellation satellites, led by the SpaceX Starlink initial launch of 60 satellites in 2019, have now reached the end of their incredibly short operating lifetimes.
