Scientists petition FCC to halt space data center race before it scorches Earth's atmosphere

One old satellite burning up in Earth's atmosphere every three minutes. That is the pace scientists calculate SpaceX's proposed constellation of one million orbital data center satellites would eventually demand — and it is the image at the heart of a new legal petition demanding the federal government stop approving space data center licenses before anyone has assessed what that much vaporized metal does to the planet.

The petition, filed with the Federal Communications Commission by the nonprofits Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, Earthjustice, and DarkSky International, calls for a pause on new licenses for orbital data center projects, arguing the approvals violate federal law, according to The Guardian. It targets not only SpaceX but a widening field of competitors — Blue Origin, Google's Project Suncatcher, and others — that have collectively proposed millions of satellites.

SpaceX filed its FCC application in late January for a constellation of up to one million satellites to serve as solar-powered orbital computing infrastructure. The FCC placed the application on a fast-track path, meaning SpaceX was not required to conduct an environmental impact assessment, according to Space.com.

That procedural decision is at the core of the accountability argument scientists are now pressing. Under the fast-track process, the burden of proof has effectively reversed.

The presumption now is that the application should be approved and that it should be up to the people who might object to prove that there's a problem of some kind. The fact that they have fast-tracked this application, which has potentially tremendous effects not only for astronomy but for the environment too, and to do so without engaging in a full environmental review, is worrisome.— John Barentine, astronomer and dark sky consultant

Barentine spoke to Space.com on behalf of a group of astronomers filing objections to the SpaceX application. Those objectors had only until March 6 to submit their documentation — a tight window for analyses that can take months.

The environmental stakes, as the petitioners frame them, go well beyond telescopes. When satellites decommission and re-enter the atmosphere, they vaporize, injecting metals — aluminum oxides, lithium, and others — directly into the stratosphere, a layer of the atmosphere that was essentially pristine before the satellite era. A NOAA-sponsored stratospheric measurement flight in late 2023 found spacecraft metals embedded in the sulfuric acid aerosols that help regulate Earth's temperature and partially shield the ozone layer, according to The Guardian. How those metals interact with the aerosols is, in scientists' own words, 'largely unknown.'

There is a lot of complex material in these things, and even if they do burn up, you do not want to be filling up the atmosphere with refuse from these any more than you would want it coming from a smoke stack.— Steve Volz, former head of the NOAA satellite office

Currently, roughly three old satellites or used rocket bodies re-enter the atmosphere per day. The SpaceX constellation, at its proposed scale and replacement cadence, would push that rate to one every three minutes, according to estimates cited by Space.com — a roughly 480-fold increase.

The petition argues that the National Environmental Policy Act requires the FCC to assess the environmental impacts of satellite licenses before granting them, and that the agency has been sidestepping that obligation. The datacenter companies, the petition states, 'describe their plans in grandiose, civilization-changing terms' while refusing 'to embrace any inquiry into the impacts of their self-claimed epochal technology on the environment, science, economy, or other values,' according to The Guardian.

SpaceX has real commercial momentum behind the plan. In May, AI company Anthropic signed agreements giving it access to SpaceX's terrestrial data center and expressed interest in eventually tapping orbital compute capacity, according to SpaceNews. SpaceX has also announced Terafab, a planned chip fabrication facility in Austin built in partnership with Tesla and Intel, to supply the semiconductors the constellation would require, according to CNBC. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said his company was growing at an annualized rate of 80 times last year's levels through the first quarter of 2026 — the kind of demand pressure that makes the orbital pitch credible to investors.

SpaceX is not alone. Blue Origin filed plans in March for 51,600 orbital data center satellites under its Project Sunrise initiative, with deployment slated to begin in late 2027, according to CNBC. Startup Starcloud raised $170 million in March for a planned constellation of up to 88,000 satellites, according to SpaceNews. The race has moved fast enough that the FCC's approval pipeline is now the primary chokepoint — which is precisely why the petitioners are targeting it.

For astronomers, the threat compounds an existing grievance. The astronomical community spent years negotiating with SpaceX to reduce Starlink's brightness — a process that brought newer satellites just above the International Astronomical Union's recommended interference threshold. The data center satellites, each potentially up to 330 feet long and orbiting in high-inclination paths that keep them in sunlight even at midnight, would undo that progress on a scale that dwarfs anything previously proposed.

It really feels like it's undermining what we have achieved in the last few years, which wasn't ideal for astronomy, but was a far cry from what we feared in 2019 when the Starlink program began. We felt we were heading in the right direction that was reasonably sustainable. And this feels like a complete reversal of that.— John Barentine, astronomer and dark sky consultant

The timing is particularly pointed: the $10 billion Vera Rubin Observatory came online last year, and the $2 billion Extremely Large Telescope is under construction in Chile. Both were designed to push the boundaries of what humanity can observe in the universe. Both would face severe obstruction from a million-satellite constellation, according to Space.com.

SpaceX declined to elaborate on its plans beyond previously released information, according to CNBC. The FCC has not publicly responded to the petition. Whether the agency treats the accountability challenge as a procedural footnote or a genuine regulatory reckoning may determine whether the orbital data center race proceeds with any environmental guardrails at all.

Why it matters — The FCC's decision on whether to require environmental review of orbital data center licenses will set the regulatory precedent for an industry that could put millions of satellites into orbit — with largely unknown consequences for the ozone layer, global temperature regulation, and the future of ground-based astronomy.

Sources differ on Whether space-based data centers will be cost-competitive with terrestrial ones within 2–3 years: Will be more cost-effective than terrestrial data centers in as little as two to three years (cnbc.com (attributed to Elon Musk, March 2026 Austin event)) vs Two to three year timelines are 'probably a little ambitious' (cnbc.com (attributed to Jeff Bezos, CNBC interview)) vs Economically 'marginal' right now (cnbc.com (attributed to investor Duncan Davidson, Bullpen Capital))

Reported by nbcnews.com, spacenews.com, cnbc.com, newsnationnow.com, theguardian.com, space.com