SpaceX reached orbit this week. Look up anyway.

If you saw the news this week, you will know that SpaceX flew its Starship to orbit for the first time on Monday, the largest rocket ever built, carrying a new generation of communications satellites up with it. It is, by any measure, a genuine milestone, and I watched the footage like everyone else. But the question I have been asked most since is not about the rocket at all. It is some version of this: with all of that going on up there, are the stars even still worth looking at from my own back porch.

Yes. Emphatically, gloriously yes. And I want to explain why, because the worry behind the question is a real one and deserves better than a pat answer.

The sky is getting busier, and you will notice

Let us be honest about that first. There are now a great many satellites in low orbit, and there will be more. On a clear evening, especially in the hour or two after sunset, you may see what looks like a small string of moving lights crossing the sky in a neat line. That is a run of satellites catching the last of the sunlight before they pass into the earth's shadow. The first time you see it, it is startling. It moves steadily, it does not blink like an aircraft, and then it simply fades. It is a strange and modern sight, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

The constellations do not care

Here is the reassuring part. Those moving lights are close to us, a few hundred kilometres up, racing round the planet in about an hour and a half. The stars of Orion are so far away that their light set out before any of this was thought of. Nothing we have launched has moved a single one of them by the width of a hair. Look up on an October night and the Plough still hangs in the north exactly where your grandparents found it, and the Square of Pegasus still climbs in the east, and the long faint river of the Milky Way, if you can get well away from the town lights, is still the most humbling thing you will see all year.

The satellites are a foreground. The stars are the deep background, and the background is untouched.

What to actually do about it

My advice is simple. If you want the great sights, the constellations and the planets and the moon, go out later, once the sky is fully dark, when most of the low satellites have slipped into shadow and stopped shining. If instead you want to catch one of those bright moving runs, go out in the first hour after dusk and look towards the west. You can, in other words, have both. The new sky and the old one are on at different times of the same evening.

We are living through a strange moment, when the space just above our heads is filling with our own machines even as we send the biggest of them higher than ever before. It is easy to feel that wonder is being crowded out. I do not think it is. I think it is being joined. The rocket is a marvel we made. The stars are a marvel we were given. There is room, on one back porch, on one clear night, to be amazed by both.