How many satellites are too many?

Broadband internet satellites are set to sweep the skies over the next decade at a scale never before seen. Just don’t ask policymakers today how exactly we’re going to manage the fallout. The story is a familiar one to longtime watchers of technology. Companies hooked up homes with electricity, with phone lines, TV signals and the internet — miracles of modern connectivity — but not without communities inheriting a cityscape loaded with hanging wires and accompanying fire hazards. Now that connectivity journey is reaching miles above the Earth, with side effects as grand as the broadband vision itself. Tech billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are planning big investments in ambitious satellite broadband networks set to spin in low-earth orbit around the globe beaming internet signals back to those of us on the ground. That could be particularly valuable in hard-to-reach rural parts of the planet. But many rules for how these systems will operate are still yet to be written, posing practical and geopolitical challenges for aspiring market players like SpaceX, Amazon and OneWeb (a troubled rival now owned by the British government). That includes how these satellites can navigate around a fractured globe without creating a cascade of orbiting debris — all while not spoiling the night sky for stargazers. Adding thousands of orbiting satellites is poised to make the sky both chock-full of visual obstruction and brighter thanks to streaks of reflected light, which could scramble astronomy and even the migratory patterns of birds.