Jeff Bezos joins Elon Musk in fueling Kessler syndrome fears with proposal to launch 51,600 satellites in AI space race
Jeff Bezos' company Blue Origin has requested permission to launch a network of more than 50,000 satellites into space.
Known as 'Project Sunrise', Blue Origin – which famously sent the likes of Katy Perry and Gayle King into space for all of ten minutes last year – wants to send 51,600 satellites into space that will act as a data center in orbit.
The company filed documentation with the Federal Communications Commission on March 19, where lawyers for Blue Origin said that the project would 'ease mounting pressure on US communities and natural resources by shifting energy — and water-intensive compute away from terrestrial data centers'.
They added, per Space News: "The built-in efficiencies of solar-powered satellites, always-on solar energy, lack of land or displacement costs, and nonexistent grid infrastructure disparities fundamentally lower the marginal cost of compute capacity compared to terrestrial alternatives."
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"Blue Origin’s Project Sunrise will serve the broad AI data center market and enable US companies developing and using AI to flourish, accelerating breakthroughs in machine learning, autonomous systems and predictive analytics in support of broad societal benefit," the attorneys continued.
Blue Origin's request comes just days after Elon Musk's company Starlink launched it 10,000th satellite, said Space.com.
Satellites like these are a key part of modern life and provides Earth with things like global communication, navigation and GPS, and weather tracking (to name a few).
But there are downsides to them: one of the biggest concerns being about Kessler syndrome.
National Space Centre has explained what Kessler syndrome is. It states on its website: "The Kessler syndrome was first proposed in 1978 by NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler. This was shortly after the Space Race and the number of satellites being sent into low Earth orbit (LEO) was accelerating rapidly.
"Kessler proposed a theoretical scenario where the number of objects in LEO would become so vast that it would cause a chain of events that could eventually stop us leaving Earth.
"Kessler’s theory is that if we keep launching into space without a plan of bringing things back down, it would cause LEO to reach a critical mass where collisions between objects would inevitably begin to happen."
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has previously warned that satellites currently orbiting our planet could seriously injure or kill someone by 2035.
Warning Musk specifically, the FFA said that 28,000 dangerous fragments could survive re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. Musk insisted that his satellites 'are designed and built to fully demise during atmospheric reentry', however.
Not only could these satellites come crashing back down to Earth and seriously injure people, they could also make space travel extremely dangerous.
Another concern is that space will become so congested with satellites that they'll start crashing into each other, thus taking each other out.
This would have a serious impact on Earth and our economy, as well as our defense systems, Neil DeGrasse Tyson explained on StarTalk Radio last year.
"The Kessler syndrome would be catastrophic to modern civilization as we have come to know it," he further warned.
Topics: Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos, Space, Technology
Niamh Shackleton