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SpaceX wants their Starlink constellation to crack 100,000, and there are plenty of competitors lining up who will surely want to have "the biggest and the best
by EA-3167 3mo ago
SpaceX wants their Starlink constellation to crack 100,000, and there are plenty of competitors lining up who will surely want to have "the biggest and the best" at some point. None of those sats stay up terribly long, so you'll have a constant cadence of launches and reentries, both of which are a risk for their impact on the climate system, atmosphere, etc.
A largely unstudied risk, and once which will almost certainly be strenuously ignored for as long as possible.
- tekla 3mo ago100 tons of whatever enter the Earth every single day. Are you freaking out about that?
- konmok 3mo agoThose are rocks, which are not made from the same stuff as satellites. (Also, the article says it's 44 tons, and other sources suggest around 50 at most.) In any case, I don't think anyone here is "freaking out", I just think this issue merits investigation.
- DiggyJohnson 3mo agoI’m not GP but your original comment did not come across as neutral
- kortilla 3mo ago[flagged]
- EA-3167 3mo agoIn the same sense that you do.
- kortilla 3mo agoNo, in a much more direct sense. By the time a Starlink sat re-enters its fuel is gone so it’s mostly a pile of silicon, solar panels, lithium batteries, aluminum, etc. The circuit boards are probably the goofiest chemical compositions but they represent a drop in the bucket mass-wise for the sats and pale in comparison to how many circuit boards get blown up every day in Iran/Ukraine/Russia.
- EA-3167 3mo agoConsidering that aluminum ash is the primary concern of tfa…