The Train of Lights in My Backyard

I almost talked myself out of going outside for this. It was a little chilly for the end of May, I'd already changed into pajama pants, and the whole thing felt like it was probably going to be a bust. Glad I went anyway.

You've probably seen the videos by now, or at least heard about them. About a week and a half ago SpaceX put sixty Starlink satellites into orbit on a single Falcon 9, launched out of Cape Canaveral late at night. Sixty. On one rocket. Each one apparently weighs something like 500 pounds, flat-packed in the fairing like the world's most expensive Ikea order. The plan, eventually, is thousands of these things forming a mesh network to beam internet down to basically anywhere on the planet, including places that will never see a cable line in my lifetime or yours.

That part is interesting on paper. What actually got me outside with a beer at 11pm was the video of the satellites still in a line right after deployment, before they'd spread out into their final orbits, drifting across the sky like a string of Christmas lights someone dropped from a plane. A guy in the Netherlands caught it on camera and the clip went everywhere. So a few nights ago, once word got around that a pass would be visible from where I live, I stood in the yard and watched for it.

And there it was. Faint, honestly, not the dramatic bright train from that first viral video (that early clip was from right after launch when they were all still bunched close together and lower up, so it was brighter and slower). By the time I saw mine they'd spread out more and dimmed down, but it was unmistakably a line of dots moving in formation, steady and quiet, crossing maybe a third of the sky in under two minutes. My neighbor's motion-sensor floodlight clicked on halfway through because a possum wandered by, which about killed the moment, but I still got it.

Here's my actual complaint, and it's not a small one: this is only sixty satellites. The stated goal is somewhere in the thousands, eventually, once the full constellation is up. I don't know how you get from "neat thing my neighbor and I stood in the yard to watch" to "several thousand objects orbiting the earth" without the night sky just looking different than it used to. Astronomers are already grumbling about this, and not the tinfoil-hat kind, actual observatories worried about streaks showing up in long-exposure images. I get that rural broadband is a real problem and I'm not pretending fiber is coming to every county anytime soon. But nobody asked me if I wanted a few thousand new dots up there, and I don't think "nobody asked anyone" is a great way to redesign something as basic as what the sky looks like at night.

I'll admit I'm being a little dramatic about it. It was genuinely cool to watch, and my kid thought it was the best thing that's happened all month, better than the fireworks we saw in April. There's something almost old-fashioned about a bunch of people standing in their yards squinting up at a satellite pass, like we're all doing amateur astronomy homework together. Feels like the kind of thing people did in the sixties, except now there's an app for it instead of a newspaper clipping telling you when to look.

Meanwhile the news this week has been all antitrust chatter, Congress apparently getting cold feet about how big Google and Amazon and Facebook have gotten, which is its own whole conversation I don't have the energy for tonight. Funny to have both of those stories going at once: is the sky getting crowded, is the market getting crowded, pick your metaphor. I just wanted to write down that I saw it, actually saw it with my own eyes and not on a phone screen, before it stops being a novelty and just becomes something that's always up there.

If you want to catch a pass yourself before they scatter completely into their final orbits, there are tracking sites that'll give you a time and a compass direction for your location. Worth the ten minutes outside. Bring a jacket.