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Green groups want licenses frozen before a million satellites litter the exosphere
Environmental groups want the FCC to slam the brakes on orbital datacenters, arguing the agency shouldn't approve constellations they say would total more than a million satellites before taking a hard look at their environmental impact.
Earthjustice, acting on behalf of DarkSky International, Environment America, and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), filed a petition this week urging the regulator to prepare a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) before approving any of the pending applications.
The filing doesn't target any single company. Instead, it asks the regulator to put the entire emerging orbital datacenter sector on hold while it assesses the cumulative effects of proposals from SpaceX, Starcloud, Blue Origin, Cowboy Space, and any similar applications that follow. According to the petition, those proposals collectively seek "well over a million datacenter satellites" in low Earth orbit.
"The FCC is currently considering multiple requests for licensing extraordinary numbers of satellite-based datacenters to be placed into low-earth orbit over the next decade," the petition states. "Collectively, the proposals seek to place well over a million datacenter satellites into orbit, increasing the existing volume of satellites in low-earth orbit by multiple orders of magnitude."
The groups argue that the FCC is trying to apply licensing rules written for much smaller satellite constellations to an entirely new class of infrastructure.
"If ever a situation warranted a PEIS, it is this one," the petition says. It argues that a single review would allow the agency to examine "the risks, alternatives, needs, costs, and impacts of this sudden transformation of Earth's exosphere" before deciding whether any of the projects are in the public interest.
The petition raises concerns about rocket launch emissions, pollutants released as satellites burn up during atmospheric reentry, depletion of the ozone layer, orbital debris, light pollution, impacts on wildlife, and interference with astronomy.
It also argues that the combined effects of these constellations cannot be understood by evaluating applications one at a time.
"It is difficult to imagine a better example of multiple projects presenting essentially identical impacts and risks that compound synergistically and cumulatively than the present proposals for orbital datacenter constellations," the petition argues. "The FCC's default position that such projects 'individually and cumulatively' have no environmental impact is plainly inapplicable here."
The groups also criticize the applicants, saying they make expansive claims about the benefits of orbital computing while offering little detail about its environmental consequences.
"The proponents of these proposals describe their plans in grandiose, civilization-changing terms," the petition states. "But these same proponents have refused to embrace any inquiry into the impacts of their self-claimed epochal technology on the environment, science, economy, or other values."
The petition arrives as the FCC reconsiders its environmental review rules for satellites, acknowledging that rapid growth in the space industry has raised new questions about how to apply its existing framework. The petition argues that the FCC's current approach, which generally treats satellite licenses as categorically excluded from detailed environmental review, is no longer fit for proposals measured not in dozens or thousands of spacecraft but in hundreds of thousands and, potentially, millions.
If the FCC agrees, orbital datacenter operators will have a mountain of paperwork to clear before sending their hardware skyward. ®
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