GoKawiilWalking inside LeoLabs’ new space radar nestled in the Maui hills felt like entering a computer. Wires dangled overhead, servers whined, and the temperature climbed in the metal box as the air conditioning leaked out when we entered.
“You don’t want to be in there when the whole thing’s running,” said Matthew Adelman, LeoLabs’ senior manager of radar systems. “Not just for the safety, but also for the noise.”
LeoLabs’ Scout-S radar is designed to be transported and setup within hours anywhere in the world. Allyza Umali/CNET
Called Scout-S, this radar designed to track space objects is the size of a 20-foot shipping container and can be transported anywhere in the world. You can hook it up to an electrical grid and fiber internet, but its real calling card is portability. You could drop the Scout-S off-grid and have it running in a couple of hours. All you need is a generator and a Starlink dish to feed the radar’s data back to a computer.
I couldn’t help but appreciate the irony at the mention of the Starlink dish: The satellite internet service revolutionized the space industry, but it also jump-started a race to space that created the need for transportable radars like the Scout-S.
The Soviet Union launched the world’s first satellite in 1957; it would take another 53 years for the population to pass 1,000. When Starlink launched its first satellite in 2019, there were still only around 2,000 orbiting Earth. Today, we’re at 16,810, and nearly 2 out of every 3 belong to Starlink.
Each one of them is zooming above us at 17,000 mph. A collision between two of them could range from extremely troubling to catastrophic. Worst-case scenario, satellites colliding with each other or a piece of space debris could set off a feedback loop known as Kessler syndrome, in which one collision creates thousands of new pieces of debris that cause yet more collisions. It could ultimately make low Earth orbit, or LEO, the sweet spot where Starlink beams down fast, low-latency internet from 342 miles over our heads, so filled with space junk that it’s no longer usable.
“We worry a lot about it because we have seen that in the last few years, the number of spacecraft has increased exponentially, and we are not stopping it,” said Lorenzo Olivieri, a professor at the University of Padova. I spoke with him this week at the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies Conference, where he was presenting a paper on space debris populations from break-up events.
“The worrisome idea of the Kessler syndrome could be a real close future,” Olivieri said.
Exactly how worried you should be about a Kessler syndrome-like scenario depends on who you ask. When I polled scientists at AMOS, their answers ran the gamut. Some said it’s only a matter of time if we stay on our current trajectory, while others waved it off as the domain of science fiction. (See the 2013 movie Gravity for a particularly vivid dramatization.)
... continue reading