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.
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.
Prof. Sam Lawler
Mastodon Migration
gunstick
GoodNewsGreyShoes🔞(on hiatus)
Tom Magnanimous