PEER renewed its call on July 8 for the FCC to fully review SpaceX's orbital data center plan. DarkSky International and Environment America joined the effort. Earthjustice filed the petition on the coalition's behalf. SpaceX asked the FCC in January for permission to launch up to a million satellites as orbital data centers. The FCC's Space Bureau accepted the application in February under a categorical exclusion, the fast lane that skips a full environmental review.
DarkSky's Ruskin Hartley said the satellites "could permanently alter the night sky." The petition also cites orbital debris risk, ozone depletion from reentry byproducts, and skyglow that already troubles observatories on U.S. soil. It frames SpaceX's proposal against a fast-growing baseline: roughly 1,400 active satellites in 2015, more than 15,000 today. A categorical exclusion sized for incremental launches now covers a filing for a million satellites at once.
None of that touches the engineering claim underneath the filing. SpaceX's megaconstellation plan puts compute in orbital shells between 500 and 2,000 kilometers, running on solar power with no water and no air for cooling. Heat rejection in vacuum works through radiation alone. Radiator area needed scales fast as density climbs, a problem this outlet has sized out in square footage before. SpaceX has published no radiator area, no thermal margin, and no duty-cycle assumption for the proposed system.
An actual environmental review would force answers the market has not gotten yet. NEPA analysis requires documented thermal performance under real orbital duty cycles, a bar no rendering deck clears. That paperwork trail is closer to independent verification than anything these orbital cooling claims have faced so far. Every megawatt SpaceX wants to put in orbit needs a radiator sized to reject it. Right now, the FCC docket is the only place anyone is asking to see that number.