Worst part of updating my talk: looking up how fucking many more Starlink satellites there were than last time I gave a version of this talk. 200 more than a month ago. Fuck.
There are now 6,209 Starlinks in orbit, fully 62% of the 10,009 active satellites in orbit.
All of these "fully demisable" Starlinks are planned to burn up and deposit their metal in Earth's atmosphere. I just saw multiple 100-pound pieces of another SpaceX "fully demisable" rocket, so I'm sure it'll be just fine.
In case it's not clear, both of these options are bad.
"Fully demisable" = 29 tons of aluminum per day in the stratosphere/mesosphere just from reentering Starlink sats, ignoring all the rocket bodies required to resupply the constantly-replaced megaconstellation.
And I hope it's obvious why 100 pound pieces of junk dropping from orbit every hour would probably be bad. So hopefully Starlink engineering is better than Crew Dragon trunk engineering?
This is such an incredibly bad situation...
Just in case we Europeans are hit by some of that junk, who must be called?
@GustavinoBevilacqua @sundogplanets
Not ESA surely, they're in this scam with NASA who in turn depend on SpaceX for launch services.
@sundogplanets @GustavinoBevilacqua
You're right and all the same they will dodge it as best as they can.
@sundogplanets @angelastella @GustavinoBevilacqua nodds in agreement And I do hope they force #SpaceX if not #Musk himself to cough up the bills!
There's a reason why ony #Billiomaire #TechBros want absurdly huge Megaconstellations like #Starlink or #AmazonKuiper to begin with, because #Iridium already exists way longer and works.
@jjokerst @sundogplanets @GustavinoBevilacqua
CNSA has a disturbingly casual attitude about boosters, more than once they have re-entered over populated areas.
And... what's relevant about STS-107 isn't the debris I'd say but feel free to disagree.
Humans do seem to be the most invasive species.
LB: 100 lbs is 45 kilos. This is approximately the combined weight of 4 entire car wheels (alloy rim + tyre) - stuff like this dropping out of the sky is clearly never a good thing,...
@sundogplanets Personally, I think that absurd amoumt of #OzoneLayer - depleting #trash should be illegal and banned as per #MontrealProtocol appendix.
But I doubt this will happen since we don't even get the bans for #CFC11 enforced and #Aluminium as well as other #Debris will deplete #Ozone even harder because they stay in the upper layers of the atmosphere way longer...
@sundogplanets I was wondering your thoughts on the Astroscale plan to deorbit space junk. Reading about it had me wondering where that stuff would end up.
@sundogplanets
😱
Why did we ban CFC after all?
And now, a single company is allowed to destroy the ozonosphere through alumina?
@sundogplanets Honest question: how many tons of aluminium burn up in the form of natural meteors?
It feels to me that bigger problems are:
- Light pollution caused by the sats (but there is also public outreach value in people seeing satellites)
- CO2 emissions of continually manufacturing and launching the sats and rockets (and Starship doesn't make that a lot better).
Multiply that by other companies also launching their own megaconstellations (SpaceX isn't the only game in town)...
@steve I've talked about this a few times. 50ish tons per day, 1% aluminum.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL109280
@steve @sundogplanets
Nets? What if we practiced?
Of course, I was just trying to figure out how Greece could send in special forces to take their stuff out of a British Museum without starting a war. Husband says Britain can't allow, they'd have nothing left if they let people get away with this. Which... true...
I'm just a bad idea bear these days.
@sundogplanets the first of Starlink satellites is set to deorbit within a year apparently, and eventually these 5-year-lifespan satellites will deorbit and (hopefully?) burn up and be replaced in kind "logrotate" style...
at a rate of one every 45 to 60 *minutes*
24 hours a day, seven days a week
fair as long as Starlink wished to maintain its constellation size
Can't wait for Ozone Hole II and prairie farmers picking Elon's Space Chunks out of their fields every year before spring planting 
@sundogplanets now that is if Elon fully achieves his vision which of course he nearly always fails to do.
However it is fully expected that Starlink constellation will settle at around 12000 satellites in orbit at any given time to achieve financial stability. This still means they will be constantly deorbiting 6 to 7 satellites a month and will be launching replacements multiple times per year...indefinitely
This is a serious amount of space debris and upper atmosphere pollution to contend with.
And this rosy scenario is if all goes according to plan. If these things start crashing into each other and trigger a Kessler Syndrome cascade, we will effectively close off low earth orbit for decades.
https://www.space.com/kessler-syndrome-space-debris
So, yeah, what we are allowing Musk to do is insane.
@mastodonmigration @sundogplanets Yeeeaaah. That's a thing. 😮💨
Ngl, there's a part of me rooting for a Kessler-like outcome for two very sad reasons:
1) completely rules out the possibility of any billionaire "escaping" their consequences on Earth
2) prevents (or at least significantly delays) the possibility of asteroid mining that results in Earth's first quadrillionaire
@funkula @GoodNewsGreyShoes @sundogplanets
Thing is, it is a highly unstable system. It might (might!) be low probability at any given time, but unlike airplanes colliding which fall to the ground, once these things smash together it unleashes thousands of small uncontrolled pieces which in turn will smash into other satellites creating more small pieces. Only one accident will trigger the entire thing, so in aggregate the probability is pretty high.
I probably got out over my skis, but I wrote a piece a few months back about how we should probably be taxing these space billionaires for putting their junk in orbit.
It certainly seems there is something of a "commons" and something of a "tragedy" here.
Is there any way for someone like me to see your talk?
This is great thank you so much. Good luck with the talk!
Thank you for your important work.
@sundogplanets lot of meteorites re-entry every day too... but it is true, that they are not aluminium.
prolonging useful life of satelites instead of mass producing them is solution.
I have hear mention, that ESA was experimenting with air breathing ion engine for low orbits. Maybe this is the solution:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere-breathing_electric_propulsion
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