China launches new satellite megaconstellation

Posted: 8th August 2024

“I did not see it in person,” says Dan Bush, of Albany, Missouri. “But my automated camera was monitoring the sky for Perseids. In the morning when I checked the footage for meteors, I discovered I had recorded this remarkable event.”

Pilot Alexander Goroshko of Westjet Airlines witnessed the display from a plane flying over Denver at 39,000 ft. “It looked amazing from the flight deck,” he says. Another pilot, Marc Livolsi, saw it twice over Ft. Dodge, Iowa, and one orbit later over Jackson, Wyoming.

The comet-like plumes are fuel dumped by the rocket booster as a safety precaution before re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. SpaceX does this all the time; their fuel dumps and deorbit burns frequently look like spirals because the rockets spin to release the Starlink satellites. This may be a case of a spiral viewed at an angle.

Thousand Sails is a Chinese initiative to compete with Starlink. Officials say that 108 satellites are planned for launch this year in separate batches of 36 and 54 satellites; another 500+ are planned for 2025. Ultimately the megaconstellation will contain more than 14,000 satellites (Starlink currently has about 6,200).

A Long March-6 rocket carrying 18 Thousand Sails satellites blasts off from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in China’s Shanxi Province on Aug. 6, 2024.

Environmentalists have raised many concerns about Starlink including light-pollution of the night sky, a potentially hazardous traffic jam in low-Earth orbit, metallic contamination of the stratosphere, and even ozone depletion. Thousand Sails and a second proposed Chinese megaconstellation named “SatNet” (13,000 satellites) will only multiply these concerns.