Houston Republic

Anyone who has not yet spotted rows of internet satellites in the night sky, put there by a company owned by South African entrepreneur Elon Musk, may not see them in future, an International Academy of Science expert said during an interview this month.

"If you haven't seen them yet, it might be a little harder to see them from now on," Roger Billings, a U.S.-based scientist, inventor and entrepreneur, said during a live academy talk on Dec. 9. "Because once people started concerning themselves with the fact that they had these lights, he [Musk] started putting sunshields on them, to block them so they wouldn't be so bright and so you can't see them. So now they're a little harder to see."

Billings is founder and head of Acellus Academy, an online K-12 school that operates under the auspices of the International Academy of Science.

The Elon Musk project, also called "StarLink," which is itself part of Musk's private spaceflight company SpaceX, is earth's largest satellite internet constellation often seen in a straight light, and more and more becoming a familiar part of the night sky. The project has been ongoing since May 2019 as SpaceX launched the internet satellites dozens at a time.

To date, about 700 SpaceX StarLink satellites are in orbit, Billings said during his live talk. Prior to the sunshield installation, the lines of satellites in the sky had been quite striking and were reported throughout the world.

"Some of you probably have been outside lately, looked up at the sky just after dark and maybe you saw something," Billings said just before he referred to video of a line of fairly fast-moving satellites that resemble a train. "That's what some people are calling it, a SpaceX satellite train."

SpaceX plans to launch more satellites.

"These things are shot up into space on a rocket ship and, in fact, in one launch - the biggest launch - was 40 satellites in one launch," Billings said. "And they go up and they fly, and they fly in these patterns. They're called constellations."

SpaceX is planning a mega-constellation of about 30,000 small satellites to provide Internet service worldwide, reaching even those remote locations that still rely on dialup or no Internet at all. Rows of satellites suddenly appearing overhead can be alarming to the uninformed and folks who don't pay attention, Billings said.

"Most people who see them for the first time are just sure that someone's people are taking over," he said.

However, even the unshielded satellites are not always visible.

"They're pretty bright and they only appear first thing after the sun sets, first thing in the evening or just before sunrise in the morning," Billings said. "That's the only time you see them."