SpaceX will test sun visor on its internet satellites

New shade will be part of devices in Sunday launch

SpaceX’s next group of 60 internet satellites will carry with them a sun visor to test if the company can complete a long-term solution to its ongoing brightness problem.

Elon Musk’s rocket company has been on an aggressive timeline to get its internet service, called Starlink, up by the end of the year in North America.

Short-term, SpaceX wants to have 1,500 Starlinks in low-Earth orbit by the end of 2020. The longterm goal is to have tens of thousands of satellites in space, helping to blanket the Earth with high-speed internet connections.

The number will be at 480 after Sunday’s launch, scheduled for 3:53 a.m. from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s launch complex 40. It’ll be the sixth Starlink launch this year and eighth overall since the program started last year. It will come less than a month from SpaceX’s most recent Starlink launch on April 22.

The company’s big ambitions for Starlink have come against criticism from the astronomical community, which says that satellites are too bright, affecting observations and data collection. On April 30, people across Florida mistook them for UFOs as a train of Starlinks passed across the night sky from the Space Coast to Broward County.

SpaceX already flew a darkened satellite in January to test whether a coating could work on the Starlinks without affecting the satellites’ thermal properties. SpaceX said the coating reduced brightness by about 55% but concerns lingered about how hot the spacecraft could get with dark paint.

This time, SpaceX will test a different solution. The mission will carry a test of the company’s deployable visor, a sunshade that will help make the Starlink spacecraft less visible to ground-based telescopes.

The visor prevents light from reflecting off antennas on the satellites by blocking the light from reaching the antennas altogether, SpaceX said, helping to address the thermal concerns and leading to better brightness reduction overall.

By the ninth flight, scheduled for June, all future Starlink satellites will have sun visors, SpaceX said. The company added that it’s also posting information on its satellites’ orbits on spacetrack.org “to facilitate observation scheduling for astronomers.”

“We are interested in feedback on ways to improve the utility and timeliness of this information,” SpaceX said.