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...
@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...
Prof. Sam Lawler
Kevin Karhan 