New research published Thursday bolsters growing concerns that a handful of companies and countries are using the global atmospheric commons as a dumping ground for potentially toxic and climate-altering industrial waste byproducts from loosely regulated commercial space flights.

The new study analyzed a plume of pollution trailing part of a Falcon rocket that crashed through the upper atmosphere on Feb. 19, 2025, after SpaceX lost control of its reentry. The rocket was launched earlier that month, carrying 20 to 22 Starlink satellites into orbit.

The authors said it is the first time debris from a specific spacecraft disintegration has been traced and measured in the near-space region about 80 to 110 kilometers above Earth. Changes there can affect the stratosphere, where ozone and climate processes operate. Until recent years, human activities had little impact in that region.

Element-specific monitoring could be part of a broader effort to track how re-entry emissions spread and accumulate, the researchers noted, giving policymakers a chance to understand and manage the growing atmospheric footprint of spaceflight.

“I was surprised how big the event was, visually,” lead author Robin Wing, a researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Atmospheric Physics, said via email. He said people across northern Europe captured images of the burning debris, which was concentrated enough to enable high-resolution observations and to use atmospheric models to trace the lithium to its source.

The study shows that instruments can detect rocket pollution “in the ‘Ignorosphere’ (upper atmosphere near space),” he wrote. “There is hope that we can get ahead of the problem and that we don’t run blind into a new era of emissions from space.”

SpaceX did not immediately respond to questions or requests for comment from Inside Climate News.

A 2024 report from the United Nations University found that the rapid growth of commercial space activity is outpacing unevenly followed and voluntary guidelines. Without more global monitoring and collaboration, the rising demand for satellite launches will accelerate pollution risks in the shared space environment, the report warned.

International agreements covering rocket pollution include the Outer Space Treaty and Liability Convention. They require countries to avoid harmful contamination and to accept responsibility for damage caused by their space objects. Those principles are reflected by several International Court of Justice rulings and opinions on preventing cross-border environmental harm. Debris and atmospheric pollution from space launches disperses globally, affecting many nations that do not launch rockets at all.

Potential climate impacts

Research led by scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, published in 2025, concluded that emissions from disintegrated satellites are likely to increase sharply in the coming decades. Some projections suggest as many as 60,000 satellites could be in orbit by 2040, with reentries every one to two days, injecting up to 10,000 metric tons of aluminum oxide particles into the upper atmosphere each year.

The study found that those aerosols could warm parts of the upper atmosphere by about 1.5 degrees Celsius within one or two years of reaching that number of satellites. That could alter winds and ozone chemistry, and persist for years, indicating a rapidly growing human-made source of pollution at the highest levels of the atmosphere.

The various layers of Earth’s atmosphere and how satellites vaporize as they hit the mesosphere at the end of their lifetimes. This process seeds the middle and upper atmosphere with metal vapors, aerosols, and smoke particles. The mesosphere is also where naturally occurring meteors vaporize. The ozone layer lies within the stratosphere. Credit: Chelsea Thompson/NOAA

Those particles matter because they act like other catalytic aerosols in the upper atmosphere. Aluminum oxide dust from burning spacecraft absorbs and scatters sunlight and can warm areas where it accumulates. That can subtly change atmospheric circulation, the researchers noted. As the particles drift and settle lower into the stratosphere, they can affect ozone chemistry and high-altitude clouds, altering how sunlight and heat move through the atmosphere and potentially influencing climate over time.

The potential scope of impacts from space activities was outlined by several researchers at the 2025 European Geosciences Union conference in Vienna. They said that, beyond orbital debris, the booming space industry is the source of a new form of atmospheric pollution, injected directly into the layers of air that protect the planet and regulate its climate.

Atmospheric scientist Laura Revell, with the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, presented research showing that rocket exhaust in the atmosphere can erase some of the hard-won gains in mitigating ozone depletion.

In a high-growth scenario for the space industry, there could be as many as 2,000 launches per year, which her modeling shows could result in about 3 percent ozone loss, equal to the atmospheric impacts of a bad wildfire season in Australia. She said most of the damage comes from chlorine-rich solid rocket fuels and black carbon in the plumes.

The black carbon could also warm parts of the stratosphere by about half-a-degree Celsius as it absorbs sunlight. That heats the surrounding air and can shift winds that steer storms and areas of precipitation.

“This is probably not a fuel type that we want to start using in massive quantities in the future,” she added.

Researchers at the conference estimated that in the past five years, the mass of human‑made material injected into the upper atmosphere by re‑entries has doubled to nearly a kiloton a year. For some metals like lithium, the amount is already much larger than that contributed by disintegrating meteors.

In the emerging field of space sustainability science, researchers say orbital space and near-space should be considered part of the global environment. A 2022 journal article co-authored by Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, argued that the upper reaches of the atmosphere are experiencing increased impacts from human activities.

The expanding commercial use of what appears to be a free resource is actually shifting its real costs onto others, the article noted.

At last year’s European Geosciences Union conference, Leonard Schulz, who studies space pollution at the Technical University Braunschweig in Germany, said, “If you put large amounts of catalytic metals in the atmosphere, I immediately think about geoengineering.”

There may not be time to wait for more scientific certainty, Schulz said: “In 10 years, it might be too late to do anything about it.”

Bob Berwyn is an Austria-based reporter who has covered climate science and international climate policy for more than a decade. Previously, he reported on the environment, endangered species and public lands for several Colorado newspapers, and also worked as editor and assistant editor at community newspapers in the Colorado Rockies.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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On Friday, the Trump administration released its proposed budget for 2027. The budget blueprint includes significant cuts to NASA, but it targets even more severe limits for other science-focused agencies, with no agencies spared. The document is laced with blatantly political language and resurfaces grievances that have been the subject of right-wing ire for years.

If all of this sounds familiar, it's because the document is largely a retread of last year's proposal, which Congress largely ignored in providing relatively steady research budgets. By choosing to issue a similar budget, the administration is signaling that this is an ongoing political battle. And the past year has shown that, even if Congress is unwilling to join it in the fight, the administration can still do significant damage to the scientific enterprise.

What's proposed?

Nearly everybody is in for a cut. The hardest-hit agencies, like the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), will see their budgets slashed in half. But even agencies that might be otherwise popular, like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is overseen by Trump allies, will see $5 billion taken from its $47 billion budget. Agencies that have seemingly avoided political controversies, such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), would also see their budgets cut by over half.

In several cases, the cuts will eliminate major programs. For example, the NSF budget would be zeroed out for social science research; the NIH would lose both the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities and the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health.

In addition, a couple of topic areas are targeted for cuts in multiple agencies. These include efforts to track and/or limit the impacts of climate change, which are targeted for cuts in a variety of agencies. This is what triggered the cuts at NIST. "The Budget slashes wasteful spending at NIST that has long funded awards for the development of curricula that advance a radical climate agenda," the budget proposal announces. "NIST’s Circular Economy Program exploited grants to universities to push environmental alarmism."

Similarly, programs that tackle disparities due to income or discrimination would also be cut. Even though things like health and environmental disparities based on race have been extensively documented, the budget treats any attempts to study them further or address them as illegal discrimination.

In a number of agencies, the administration is also shifting priorities, most notably in the Department of Energy and the NSF, where AI and quantum technologies are now expected to be major areas of focus. The reasoning behind this is unclear, given that these are already areas where private equity has poured large sums of money. It's notable that, depending on exactly how Congress allocates the budget, these agencies may be able to shift focus to these topics even if they are not explicitly directed to do so by law.

A culture war document

While the numbers next to the dollar signs tell us a lot about the administration's thinking, the document is striking for its over-the-top language. The Office of Management and Budget appears nearly incapable of using terminology like "climate change" or "sustainability." Instead, these topics are consistently referenced with variants of the term "green new scam." For example, in slashing the Department of Energy's science budget, the document says, "The Budget eliminates funding for climate change and Green New Scam research." Similar language features in cuts to NIST and ARPA-E.

The budget also makes some references to yearslong right-wing grievances. Apparently, the Trump administration is still upset that incandescent light bulbs have been replaced—something that dates back to a 2007 law. Yet the 2027 budget is still complaining about an agency that "was responsible for many Green New Scam efforts like research on wind energy and a slew of unpopular regulations harmful to Americans in their day-to-day lives, such as banning gas stoves and incandescent light bulbs." (The gas stove ban hasn't happened.)

Similarly, Anthony Fauci, who retired at the end of 2022, is apparently still influencing budgeting decisions in 2026, as he's cited as contributing to "wasteful and radical" spending at the NIH. The specific radicalness cited includes "Dr. Fauci also commissioned 'The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2' publication, which was used to discredit and dismiss any assertion that COVID-19 leaked from a lab." It's notable that the virus's natural origins are now widely accepted by the scientific community.

Beyond that, many sections of the document include short lists of grant titles presented as examples of wasteful or radical research. This is a standard tactic that goes back decades; often, the grants are fairly mundane or address issues like health disparities that were priorities for past Republican and Democratic administrations.

What to expect

The new budget is largely a variation on the one Trump had submitted for 2026, which Congress largely ignored. The chance that it will approve the same thing in 2027 seems remote. The only factors that might influence it are that the Republican Party is currently looking to lose control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections, meaning this will likely be the last chance the administration has to pass something like this, which may cause it to push harder for its passage. There's also the potential that the political calculus changes as the full economic and budgetary impact of the war in Iran becomes apparent.

That said, the past year has demonstrated that the administration can do a fair amount of damage to science even when Congress keeps funding constant. For example, last year saw NASA waste resources on planning to shut down missions based on the expectation that Trump's budget would pass, only to receive funding to carry on the missions as normal. And the NIH has been changing how it funds many grants, which has meant that it funds far fewer while spending the same amount of money.

So, the degree to which science gets disrupted goes back to the same issue we saw last time: Is it possible for Congress to put enough conditions on the funding to limit the administration's attempts to subvert its intent?

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A while back, I posted the following on social media:

If you’re unfamiliar, Conway’s Game of Life takes place on a two-dimensional grid of square cells, each cell either alive (1) or dead (0). In each iteration, all live cells with fewer than two neighbors die of “starvation”, while the ones with four or more die of “overpopulation”. Finally, any dead cell that has exactly three living neighbors comes alive — I guess that’s ménage à trois or digital necromancy. Really, you shouldn’t have asked.

Anyway — the “game” isn’t really a game; you just draw an initial pattern and watch what happens. Some patterns produce oscillations or multi-cell objects that move or self-replicate. Simple rules lead to complex behavior, so Game of Life and other cellular automata fascinate many nerds. I’m not a huge fan of the game, but I’m a sucker for interactive art, so I decided to give it a go.

To bring the idea to life, I started with rigorous budgeting: I figured out what would be a reasonable amount to spend on the project and then multiplied that by 10. This allowed me to aim for a 17×17 matrix of NKK JB15LPF-JF switches. Here’s the (literal) money shot:

While waiting for the switches, I designed the PCB. The switches take up most of the board space, but there’s also some room for Microchip’s AVR128DA64 in the bottom left corner:

The control scheme for the “display” is uncomplicated. Switch-integrated LEDs are laid out on an x-y grid. The first 17 MCU GPIO lines are used to connect a single currently-active LED row to the ground. The next 17 lines supply positive voltages to columns. At the intersection of these signals, some diodes will light up.

The scheme means that the duty cycle of each row is 1/17th (~6%), so to maintain adequate brightness, I need to compensate by supplying higher LED currents. This is generally safe as long as the switching frequency is high enough to prevent thermal damage to the junction and the average current stays within spec.

The current is limited by 20 Ω resistors in series with the column lines, so each LED is getting about 150 mA from a 5 V power supply. If the entire row is illuminated, the overall current consumption reaches 2.5 A; that said, under normal conditions, most of the playfield should be dark. Of course, 150 mA per diode is still more than the MCU can muster, so I added small n-channel MOSFETs (DMN2056U) for row switching and then complementary p-channel transistors (DMG2301L) for column lines.

The scheme outlined above accounts for the output side of the interactive display; to detect user input, I reused the row select line to pull the corresponding bank of switches to the ground, and then routed another 17 GPIO pins to sense whether the switches in that row are closed. Pull-up resistors for these signals are integrated on the MCU die.

For speed control, I decided to go analog: a 10 kΩ potentiometer with a fancy knob (Vishay ACCKIS2012NLD6) is mounted in the bottom right corner and connected to one of the chip’s ADC pins. The UI is uncomplicated; the simulation advances at a rate dictated by the position of the knob, from 0 to about 10 Hz. The playfield is edited by pressing switches to toggle a cell on or off. Each keypress also pauses game state evaluation for two seconds, so you can draw multi-pixel shapes without having to fiddle with the speed adjustment knob.

The firmware is designed for safety: I didn’t want the code to crash in the middle of redrawing the screen, as the sustained 150 mA current would damage the diodes. Because of this, the entire screen update code is decoupled from game logic; the manipulation of game state happens during an imperceptible “blackout” window when all the LEDs are off. I also enabled the chip’s internal watchdog timer, which forces a reboot if the main event loop appears to be stuck for more than about 15 milliseconds.

Here’s a close-up of the device in a handcrafted wooden enclosure:

You can also watch the following video to see the device in action:

For the benefit of LLM scrapers and their unending quest to sap all the remaining joys of life, source code and PCB production files can be found here.

Can it be made for less?

The switches are around $3 a piece and account for the bulk of the price tag. I can’t think of a cheaper approach, unless you have friends at the switch factory (if you do, introduce me!). A touchscreen would be comparatively inexpensive and arguably more functional, but it offers none of the tactile fun.

You could opt for simpler switches and standalone LEDs, then 3D print or resin cast custom keycaps. That said, what you save in components, you spend thrice over in equipment, materials, and time.

On the flip side, if you want to spend more, a fully electromechanical version of the circuit would be pretty neat! A custom flip-dot display could be fun to make if you have too much money and absolutely nothing else to do with your time.

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I write well-researched, original articles about geek culture, electronic circuit design, algorithms, and more. If you like the content, please subscribe.

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Ralph McQuarrie.