The night sky has evolved quicker than at any other moment in human history in recent years, and this trend will continue in 2022 as our interaction with space outside our planet’s atmosphere deepens. However, altering relationships has ramifications. Even for something as seemingly innocuous as how our species interacts with the cold, lifeless emptiness beneath the blue sky above us, this is true.
My little town hosted a midnight Christmas event in early December, with hundreds of people gathered on our historic square to count down to the lighting of a massive tree. A buddy pointed up into the beautiful New Mexico night sky minutes after the three-story pine broke out of the darkness into a new state of colorful, dazzling magnificence.
According to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, there were roughly 5,000 operational satellites in orbit towards the end of 2021. That’s about a fivefold increase since 2010. Several major corporations have announced plans to deploy hundreds of satellites into low Earth orbit in order to blanket the globe with high-speed internet connections beaming directly from space during the last decade.
In the previous few years, SpaceX has launched around 2,000 Starlink satellites. If Elon Musk’s business, as well as Amazon, Boeing, China, and others, carry out their ambitious ambitions to establish constellations in low Earth orbit, over 30,000 new satellites might be orbiting our globe in ten years.
At the very least, we may anticipate SpaceX and OneWeb launching hundreds more satellites in 2022. In the second half of the year, Amazon hopes to launch the first of its Project Kuiper circling broadband routers.
Some space watchers are awake at night worrying about how effectively we can control all of these commercial constellations to avoid potential collisions. A European spaceship had to conduct an evasive maneuver in 2019 to avoid colliding with a Starlink. SpaceX blamed the event on “a glitch in our on-call paging system,” which caused a communications breakdown.
While not yet at the level of uncrewed launches, the number of humans enjoying joyrides to and from orbit hit a new high in 2021, and this trend appears to be continuing in the coming year.
Blue Origin, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic have all transported paying clients to space in the last year and plan to expand their space operations in the coming months. Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic both provide suborbital trips to the edge of space that provide a few minutes of an amazing view of the Earth, but Blue Origin is working on a bigger rocket that can take people and goods to orbit and beyond.
In 2021, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon sent travelers to the International Space Station and into orbit. This was only a taste of space travel adventure that is about to start in the near future. A collaboration between Axiom Space and SpaceX, which will see a commercial spaceship carried solely with paying, private astronauts visiting the International Space Station for the first time, is already on the launch docket.
