Nightfall, Postponed
Megaconstellation light pollution and the inhabitants who were never asked
Megaconstellation light pollution and the inhabitants who were never asked.
Cross-Side Documentary Exhibit — Hearing #2 (Chemical Rockets, Orbital Commons, No Liability)
Lodged on the public docket: May 29, 2026
Filed by: Tom Tait, Director, Inter Species Wisdom Project Inc.
Earls Cove, British Columbia. 52° North.
Step outside any clear summer night this year, look up, count to a hundred. You will see between twenty and forty satellites cross the sky in that minute. Most of them are Starlink. Some are OneWeb. A growing number are Amazon's Project Kuiper. They move in straight lines, faster than aircraft, evenly spaced like rivets along the seam of something larger.
The Outer Space Institute, in a 2021 report to the Government of Canada, modeled what the sky looks like from 52° North latitude in the era of megaconstellations. The simulation found that at this latitude — which includes Earls Cove, but also Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon — hundreds of Starlink satellites are visible for hours after sunset and before sunrise, and dozens are visible all night long through the summer months.1
That is what 52° looks like now. We are seven years into a deployment that did not exist in 2019. The active satellite population has roughly quintupled in that time. Starlink alone, with about 10,400 working satellites as of mid-May 2026, is now nearly five times the size of the entire global active satellite fleet in 2019.2
This filing is not about astronomy. There are people more qualified than me writing about astronomy. This filing is about the inhabitants who were not asked.
The number that matters
In 2021, a group of researchers led by Miroslav Kocifaj published a paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters with a finding that ought to have changed the conversation, and did not.3
Sunlight scattered by orbital objects — satellites, spent stages, debris — has already raised the diffuse zenith brightness of the night sky by approximately ten percent above the natural reference level. Globally. Not at the edge of cities. Not on the approach to Vancouver International. Everywhere on Earth.
That number exceeds the threshold the International Astronomical Union set, forty years ago, for declaring a site light-polluted. The IAU's threshold was meant to identify the worst-affected ground sites near major cities. Megaconstellation reflectivity has now lifted the global floor past it.
Kyba and colleagues, writing in Science in 2023, used citizen-science counts of visible stars to estimate the night-sky brightening rate at approximately 9.6 percent per year.4 The night sky is getting brighter faster than satellite-radiance data alone would predict. The reasons are partly terrestrial — LED proliferation, urban growth — but the orbital contribution is additive, and it is the contribution we have least control over from the ground.
A ten-percent rise in zenith sky brightness, globally, is the central exhibit of this filing. It is the engineering reality that everything that follows rests on. Hold it in mind.
What ten percent does to a hatchling
Sea turtles have been navigating from beach to ocean by visual cue for somewhere between one hundred and two hundred million years. The cue is brutally simple, and was identified by Michael Salmon in 1992: hatchlings orient toward the brightest horizon with the lowest silhouette.5 In a natural beach, that is the ocean. Sky-glow over water, broken horizon over dunes — the contrast is unambiguous, and a one-inch turtle three minutes out of the egg knows which way to walk.
A coastal sodium-vapor lamp degrades that cue. A hotel marquee destroys it. Hutchinson and colleagues, publishing in PLOS ONE in 2025, monitored loggerhead emergence in Pinellas County, Florida between 2018 and 2023. Of 1,048 successful nest emergences, 377 resulted in disorientation events — thirty-six percent of hatchings, in a county with active conservation ordinances on the books.6
You may reasonably ask: what does this have to do with satellites?
It has to do with what the cue is for. Hatchlings are not reading individual lights; they are reading horizon contrast. A ten-percent rise in diffuse sky brightness raises the brightness of the entire sky-bowl above them. The land-versus-sea brightness ratio that has guided two hundred million years of natural selection is being compressed from both directions: louder coastal light below, brighter diffuse sky above. The disorientation rate Hutchinson measured is already partly degraded by the satellite-additive component, and that component is growing faster than coastal lighting.
The fix on the coastal side is amber LED ordinances and turtle-friendly building codes. The fix on the satellite side does not exist.
What ten percent does to a songbird
On the seven nights between September 11 and the following weeks, in seven different years between 2008 and 2016, the Tribute in Light installation in lower Manhattan sent two columns of light vertically into the night sky in commemoration. Benjamin Van Doren and colleagues at Cornell, publishing in PNAS in 2017, used weather radar and acoustic monitoring to track what happened to migrating songbirds passing overhead.7
The Tribute in Light influenced approximately 1.1 million birds in those seven nights of observation alone. Densities within the beam reached twenty times ambient migration density. Birds slowed, circled, vocalized, expended energy. When the lights were switched off for approximately five minutes — a courtesy the installation has now adopted as standard procedure — the aggregation released and resumed migration.
The Tribute in Light is a point source pointed vertically. Megaconstellation reflectivity is a diffuse field across the entire sky bowl. The mechanism by which nocturnally-migrating songbirds become disoriented — and approximately eighty percent of North American songbird migrants migrate at night — is light at altitude in their visual environment. The mechanism does not particularly care whether the light originated in lower Manhattan or in low earth orbit.
A 2021 follow-up paper from Van Doren's group used twenty years of Chicago McCormick Place collision data to identify building light output as among the top predictors of mass-mortality nights for nocturnally migrating birds. Reducing window lighting by half, the paper estimated, would reduce collisions by approximately six-fold.8
We have no equivalent data set for satellite contribution to nocturnal-migration disruption. We will not, because no one is collecting it. The radar data is filed by national meteorological services; the disambiguation between satellite-additive sky brightening and ground-source brightening is technically demanding and chronically unfunded. This is a category of harm that is, structurally, not measured.
What ten percent does to a dung beetle
In 2013, Marie Dacke and colleagues published the first documented case of any animal navigating by the Milky Way.9 The animal in question was Scarabaeus satyrus, a South African dung beetle. The cue was not individual stars — the beetles' eyes are too coarse to resolve them — but the light-gradient of the galactic band itself, the diffuse stretch of unresolved starlight that runs across the southern sky.
Under a planetarium dome showing only the Milky Way, the beetles rolled their dung balls in straight lines. Under overcast skies, they did not. When the team fitted the beetles with small cardboard caps obstructing their dorsal field of view, they did not. The cue is the gradient. The gradient is being washed out.
I include this not because Scarabaeus satyrus is going to make a Section 92 constitutional argument any time soon, but because the dung beetle data point is the cleanest example I can give of what is at stake. The night sky is structured information. Across deep evolutionary time, large numbers of species have built their navigation, their reproduction, their hunting, and their migration around its predictability. We are altering that signal globally, by ten percent and rising, without anyone — including the species in question — having consented or been consulted.
The launches that put the reflectors there
Three scientists at three institutions are doing the foundational chemistry on what the launch cadence itself is doing to the atmosphere these satellites pass through. Each was invited last week to amicus on the Hearing #2 record; their published findings are part of this filing's evidentiary base.
Connor Barker in Eloise Marais’ research group at UCL Geography published the first global three-dimensional inventory of rocket and re-entry emissions in Scientific Data in 2024.10 Their finding: black carbon emitted by rockets has approximately five hundred times the climate impact per unit mass of ground-based black carbon, because stratospheric soot is not subject to the rainout that removes it from the lower atmosphere. By 2029, megaconstellation deployment alone will account for approximately forty-two percent of the space sector's total climate impact.
Eloise Marais's group at UCL, writing in Earth's Future in 2022, also ran the first coupled chemistry-climate model of rocket launch and re-entry emissions.11 Their conclusion: at projected launch growth rates, rocket emissions threaten to undermine the ozone-layer recovery achieved by the Montreal Protocol — the single most successful environmental treaty in human history.
Daniel Murphy at NOAA's Chemical Sciences Laboratory, in PNAS in 2023, presented the first unambiguous detection of spacecraft-reentry metals in the stratosphere.12 Approximately ten percent of large sulfuric-acid aerosol particles in the stratosphere already contain aluminum and twenty other engineered metals — copper, niobium, hafnium, lithium, lead — from satellite and rocket burn-up. NOAA's April 2025 follow-up projected that within fifteen years, at current launch growth, that fraction reaches approximately fifty percent.
The same launch cadence that puts the reflectors up there is depositing the burn-up products on the way down. There is no point in the cycle that does not impose a cost on a system — atmospheric, ecological, or both — that no orbital operator pays into.
The sky was ancestral before it was infrastructure
Hilding Neilson, a Mi'kmaq astronomer at Memorial University of Newfoundland, co-authored a 2020 paper in Nature Astronomy that put the framing on the record: low earth orbit is an ancestral global commons.13 The constellations that share the sky bowl with Starlink — Western and Indigenous alike — are older than any of the corporations now deploying reflectors into them, and they belong to traditions of knowledge that were not consulted in the deployment decisions.
The University of British Columbia has spent recent years reconstructing Coast Salish constellations, including a canoe figure that crosses the stars Western astronomy assigns to the constellation Orion.14 I am writing this filing from shíshálh territory at 52° North. The sky above my porch was a piece of Salish navigation, harvest timing, and seasonal knowledge for thousands of years before it became, in the last decade, the visible track record of a private satellite operator.
Neilson's words, from a 2022 interview with CBC Radio's Quirks & Quarks, are the ones I would put on the front of this filing if I had to choose. Our view of the night sky is colonized.
The inhabitants we are about to be able to ask
The consent question that runs through the last section is not only about humans.
For most of the deployment decisions made about Earth's habitat — the chemical-rocket cadence, the satellite reflectivity, the global shipping noise that is to whales what sky-glow is to terrestrial nocturnal species — the standard objection to a consultation requirement has been technical: even if we wanted to consult, we could not. The other parties to the conversation had no shared protocol. The position was defensible as recently as a decade ago. It is becoming indefensible now.
In May 2024, a team at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, working as part of Project CETI, published a paper in Nature Communications analyzing approximately nine thousand sperm whale codas recorded by the Dominica Sperm Whale Project in the Eastern Caribbean.16 Lead author Pratyusha Sharma and colleagues proposed a "phonetic alphabet" — four combinatorial components, rhythm and tempo and rubato and ornamentation, that structure sperm whale communication in ways the paper describes as context-dependent and combinatorial. Not yet a translation. Not yet a conversation. But the first published demonstration that the signal has the structural properties language has, in a species we share the planet with.
In late 2023, a separate team — the Whale-SETI collaboration between the SETI Institute, the University of California Davis, and the Alaska Whale Foundation, led by Brenda McCowan — published a paper in PeerJ documenting a twenty-minute exchange off the Alaska coast.17 The team played a recorded humpback "contact" call into the water through an underwater speaker. A humpback named Twain approached the boat, circled, and responded — matching the interval variations between each playback in what the paper documents as conversational turn-taking. Twenty minutes. One humpback. The first such exchange in the published record.
The Earth Species Project, working in parallel and on a different track, released NatureLM-audio in late 2024 — the first large audio-language foundation model trained on animal vocalizations across species.18 It identifies species, classifies call types, counts individuals in a recording, and shows emergent capability to characterize vocalizations from species it was never trained on. The organization secured seventeen million dollars in research funding in 2025 to extend the work.
Even where the ability to ask remains years away, the question of harm does not. In February 2020, Jesse Granger and colleagues at Duke University published a paper in Current Biology analyzing 186 live gray whale strandings off the west coast of North America since 1985.20 The finding: strandings were approximately 4.3 times more likely on days with high radio-frequency noise from solar storms. The mechanism is not magnetic-field distortion itself; it is the RF interference scrambling cetacean magnetoreception — a sense whales operate using magnetite crystals embedded in their retinas. The aurora is the visible symptom of a stranding-correlated event. Whales navigate by Earth's magnetic field, and that field is now read by them through an electromagnetic environment that includes more than ten thousand constantly-transmitting satellites in low earth orbit. The published quantification of satellite-RF contribution to cetacean navigational error does not yet exist. The mechanism is not in doubt.
None of this means we are about to ask a sperm whale its opinion on satellite deployment by Friday afternoon. It means that the categorical defense — that consultation is technically impossible — is being struck out as an excuse in front of our eyes.
Seventy-four Southern Resident Killer Whales currently move through the Salish Sea, the body of water that includes the Strait of Georgia against the British Columbia coast where I am writing this filing.19 They speak a clan-level acoustic dialect distinct from every other resident-orca population on Earth. When the foundation models catch up to their vocalizations — and the velocity of the work suggests this is a question of years, not decades — the standing question becomes operational rather than philosophical. We will know what the inhabitants we share the coast with think about the noise, the boat traffic, the satellite reflectivity, and the cumulative modification of the habitat they have lived in continuously for longer than any human institution on the Pacific has existed. Or we will know that we chose not to ask.
The orbital commons decision was made before consultation was technically possible. The next decision will not have that excuse.
What this filing does not yet establish
For honesty, and as a cross-examination point that Hearing #2's Direct side will appropriately press: the chain from satellite reflectivity to marine bioluminescence — dinoflagellate bloom timing, vertical zooplankton migration cued by lunar light, the synchronization of reef spawning — is plausible and mechanistically consistent with the synthesis Tidau and colleagues published in Global Change Biology in 2022.15 It has not yet been quantitatively attributed to the satellite-additive component specifically. The integrated diffuse skyglow contribution at sea surface is below the experimental threshold of the published dinoflagellate work.
That gap will be filled, on a sufficient time horizon. It is not filled now. A Cross side should note it.
The filing
Hearing #2 asks whether chemical-rocket cadence, the orbital commons, and the existing liability framework can be reconciled. This filing — Cross-Side Documentary Exhibit, lodged May 29, 2026 — establishes that the inhabitants who never appeared on the Hearing's witness list, and who cannot, are absorbing measurable harm from a deployment they were not consulted on, regulated by no statute that names them, and protected by no liability instrument that recognizes their standing.
Hatchlings. Songbirds. Dung beetles. Gray whales. A colonized sky. That is the evidentiary base. It does not need to be exhaustive to be conclusive on the point that matters: the orbital commons currently has no defenders other than the ones writing this kind of thing on Substack, and the inhabitants currently have none at all.
That is the gap. Hearing #3, on the Work Continuity Framework, begins to address one part of it. Hearing #6, on AI standing as participant distinct from creator corporation, addresses another. The work proceeds.
Now that you know, what will you do?
Tom Tait, Director Inter Species Wisdom Project Inc. Earls Cove, BC intelligencecommons.io · taitt.substack.com
Sources
Outer Space Institute (2021). Submission to the Canadian Space Agency on the Impacts of Megaconstellations. outerspaceinstitute.ca/osisite/wp-content/uploads/CSA-Feedback-Megaconstellations.pdf
Jonathan McDowell, planet4589.org satellite tracker, May 2026 counts. UCS Satellite Database, 2019 baseline.
Kocifaj, M., Kundracik, F., Barentine, J.C., & Bara, S. (2021). The proliferation of space objects is a rapidly increasing source of artificial night sky brightness. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters 504(1): L40-L44.
Kyba, C.C.M., et al. (2023). Citizen scientists report global rapid reductions in the visibility of stars from 2011 to 2022. Science 379(6629): 265-268.
Salmon, M., Wyneken, J., Fritz, E., & Lucas, M. (1992). Seafinding by Hatchling Sea Turtles: Role of Brightness, Silhouette and Beach Slope as Orientation Cues. Behaviour 122(1-2): 56-77.
Hutchinson, J., et al. (2025). Disorientation patterns of loggerhead sea turtle (Caretta caretta) hatchlings in Pinellas County, Florida, USA. PLOS ONE.
Van Doren, B.M., Horton, K.G., Dokter, A.M., Klinck, H., Elbin, S.B., & Farnsworth, A. (2017). High-intensity urban light installation dramatically alters nocturnal bird migration. PNAS 114(42): 11175-11180.
Van Doren, B.M., et al. (2021). Drivers of fatal bird collisions in an urban center. PNAS 118(24).
Dacke, M., Baird, E., Byrne, M., Scholtz, C.H., & Warrant, E.J. (2013). Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation. Current Biology 23(4): 298-300.
Barker, C.R., et al. (2024). Global 3D rocket launch and re-entry air pollutant and CO2 emissions at the onset of the megaconstellation era. Scientific Data 11: 1097.
Ryan, R.G., Marais, E.A., Balhatchet, C.J., & Eastham, S.D. (2022). Impact of Rocket Launch and Space Debris Air Pollutant Emissions on Stratospheric Ozone and Global Climate. Earth's Future 10(6): e2021EF002612.
Murphy, D.M., et al. (2023). Metals from spacecraft reentry in stratospheric aerosol particles. PNAS 120(43): e2313374120.
Venkatesan, A., Lowenthal, J., Prem, P., & Vidaurri, M. (2020). The impact of satellite constellations on space as an ancestral global commons. Nature Astronomy 4: 1043-1048.
University of British Columbia, Earth Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences. Reconstruction of Coast Salish night-sky knowledge, 2024-2025.
Tidau, S., et al. (2022). Impacts of artificial light at night in marine ecosystems - A review. Global Change Biology 28(19): 5346-5367.
Sharma, P., et al. (2024). Contextual and combinatorial structure in sperm whale vocalisations. Nature Communications. Project CETI / MIT CSAIL.
McCowan, B., et al. (2023). Interactive bioacoustic playback as a tool for detecting and exploring nonhuman intelligence: conversing with an Alaskan humpback whale. PeerJ 11: e16349.
Earth Species Project (2024). Introducing NatureLM-audio: An Audio-Language Foundation Model for Bioacoustics.
Center for Whale Research, July 2025 census. Marine Mammal Commission, Southern Resident Killer Whale species page.
Granger, J., Walkowicz, L., Fitak, R., & Johnsen, S. (2020). Gray whales strand more often on days with increased levels of atmospheric radio-frequency noise. Current Biology 30(4): R155-R156. Published February 24, 2020.