SpaceX has asked the U.S. FCC to launch up to one million satellites as orbital AI data centres — on top of the ~10,000 Starlink already in orbit. Astronomers warn that at that scale we’d see more satellites than stars across large parts of the night, everywhere on Earth. This viewfinder shows roughly what a 35mm frame of dark sky would look like under each scenario.
BBC News — SpaceX applies to launch a million satellites →By the way — I also make Weathergraph, an obsessively detailed hour-by-hour forecast drawn as a single chart, so you read the whole day or week at a glance. Same love of packing real information into one frame — just with fewer satellites in the way.
A 35mm full-frame lens sees about 54.4° × 37.8° — roughly 9.5% of the visible hemisphere. The naked eye sees fewer than 4,500 stars across the whole sky, so a dark-sky 35mm frame holds ~410 stars. They’re drawn as a star-tracked frame (fixed), so any moving point is a satellite.
How they actually look & move. Real Starlinks are bright bluish-white dots that shine steadily — they don’t blink like aircraft. Because every satellite rides a shared orbital plane, a pass is a set of parallel tracks, not random scatter. Fresh launches travel as a tight, evenly-spaced “string of pearls” train before they disperse around their plane. This sim uses a handful of discrete lanes (Starlink shells sit near 53°, 70° and 97.6° polar inclinations) with trains running along them; each train is sized slightly differently to reflect varying orbital altitude.
Counts. Lawler, Boley & Rein calibrated to real Starlink: at 65,000 satellites, 1 in 15 visible points is already a satellite. I scale that visible-fraction per scenario, then raise the 1M case — the proposed orbital-data-centre satellites sit in higher orbits that stay sunlit longer, so their all-sky sim predicts tens of thousands naked-eye-visible at once.
| Scenario | Constellation | Visible / sky | In 35mm frame |
|---|---|---|---|
| Now | ~10,000 | ~80 | ~8 |
| Approved | 42,000 | ~270 | ~26 |
| Proposed | 1,000,000 | ~15,000 | ~1,400 |
Illustrative prototype, not an observatory-grade ephemeris — real visibility swings with season, latitude and time of night, peaking near dusk and dawn. The plan was filed with the FCC in Jan 2026. Appearance/motion: space.com, DLR, orbitalradar. Counts: Lawler, Boley & Rein, “A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky,” The Conversation, Mar 2026.