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 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
Prof. Sam Lawler
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