Since December, Michael Cobb has been checking the night skies above Animas City to observe a line of light dots. While he’s sure they’re not alien craft beginning their invasion of Earth, he was not certain what he was seeing.
“They are single lights sometimes eight or 10 in a row. They’re not blinking. There’s no noise, and they travel pretty fast,” he said. “It lasts 10 minutes to 15 minutes.”
Cobb thought they might be drones, maybe some kind of wild project backed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, but it turns out another billionaire is likely responsible for the nighttime light show: Elon Musk.
Musk’s SpaceX is launching at least 12,000 and perhaps as many as 42,000 mini satellites – they’re about the size of a flattened car – as part of its Starlink program to blanket the Earth with internet signals.
“(Starlink) appears to be the most plausible explanation, but at the same time, it’s not always a line of them, sometimes it’s individual ones,” Cobb said.
The idea behind Starlink is to provide internet to service to parts of the world that don’t already have internet, usually as a paid service. The Starlink internet signal won’t be as fast as a fiber-optic connection but should be faster than current satellite connections. Musk plans to finance SpaceX trips to Mars with the revenue from Starlink.
Charlie Hakes, senior lecturer of physics and engineering at Fort Lewis College, said Cobb is likely seeing sunlight reflecting off the mini Starlink satellites, which are being launched in bunches of 60 by SpaceX’s Falcon 9 reusable rockets.
Initially, satellites are put in low Earth orbit, about 180 miles above the surface of the Earth. Then the satellites use their own onboard ion engines to raise their altitude, over the course of several months, to their final orbits between 211 and 342 miles above the Earth’s surface.
“My understanding is that after they get in the orbit, their final orbit, they’ll be more spread out, and then at the higher orbits, they won’t be quite as visible. But right after they’re launched, that’s what people are seeing, a string of light dots,” Hakes said.
Cobb said the line of lights travel in one direction or another varying from night to night, one night going west to east then the next going northwest to southeast. He began observing them at dusk around 8:45 p.m., but now the lights are becoming visible shortly after 9 p.m.
“They appear to be moving as fast as an airplane. They don’t zig or zag. Whatever path they are on, they maintain. Every night, it’s a different path,” Cobb said.
Wherever the Starlink mini-satellites are flying at dawn and dusk, reports of UFO sightings have ballooned across the planet as people mistake sunlight reflected from the spacecraft as unidentified flying objects.
Since Starlink’s first launch in May 2019, the mini-satellites have been controversial among members of the astronomy community because they are so visible, Hakes said.
“I don’t know what generation of satellites the Starlink program is on, but they keep tweaking the design of the satellites to make them less obvious,” Cobb said. “I don’t think they would necessarily call it stealth technology, but they’re doing some simple things like painting them black and changing orientation slightly, so they don’t reflect as much. It’s definitely been talked about and it’s kind of an issue.”
As of mid-April, SpaceX had launched 360 of at least 12,000 planned Starlink satellites. Before the coronavirus hit, Musk’s firm planned to launch about 1,500 of the mini-satellites by the end of 2020.
The sheer number of mini-satellites planned for the Starlink program – if 12,000 are launched, it would increase the number of active satellites by six times – also has drawn attention to the program because it increases the possibility of satellites crashing into each other and creating debris fields in orbit.
Hakes said he’s been busy with online classes and hasn’t had a chance to go out and observe the Starlink satellites on their flybys.
Online apps like Orbitrack, Hakes said, are available for people to track the satellites visible in the night skies.
“It’s been in my queue to do,” Hakes said. “People have been talking about it for a year, so it’s not really a new thing, but I’ve been so busy with online classes, I haven’t had a chance to go out and look at them.”
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