Mastodawn

Any journalists want to write an article about all the environmental costs of the more than 10,000 Starlinks that are now in orbit? All I'm seeing are breathless articles mindlessly worshiping That Awful Billionaire for crossing the 10,000 satellite mark.

Every single one of those will come down in an uncontrolled reentry. That's a lot of metal in the atmosphere, and a lot of dice-rolling to see if any more pieces will make it to the ground.

SpaceX is truly awful.

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Becovich 2d ago

@sundogplanets
I always ask myself: Why so many?

Starlink is designed to try to sell slightly-lower-latency links at a steep premium.

To do that, the Starlinks need to fly low.

To fly low and provide continuous coverage, SpaceX needs a lot of them.

Versus Iridium managing with 76 active satellites.

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skaphle 1d ago

@michael_w_busch @Becovich Starlink also has higher ambitions concerning internet speed or bandwidth. I think that also requires more satellites, no?

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Georg Weissenbacher 1d ago

@skaphle @Becovich as @michael_w_busch writes, the problem is not necessarily bandwidth - satellites can provide a very high bandwidth - it is latency. Satellites in geostationary orbit, for instance, have a latency of 1/4 of a second. That’s why Musk’s satellites need to fly low. But that reduces the area they can cover.