One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

https://earthsky.org/human-world/1-to-2-starlink-satellites-falling-back-to-earth-each-day/

by af78 • 10 months ago

263 330 10 months ago

Soon, McDowell told us, there will be up to 5 satellite reentries per day

Starlink’s next-generation V3s, which will require Starship to launch, weigh in around 2 metric tonnes [1]. (They’re currently “around 260 and 310 kilograms” [2].)

“Every day, Earth is bombarded with more than 100 tons [91 metric tons] of dust and sand-sized particles” [3]. So we’re talking about a 2 to 10% increase in burn-up by mass. (Not accounting for energy, which natural burn-up has more of, or incomplete burn-up, which reduces the atmospheric effects of artificial mass.)

Broadly speaking, we don’t seem to be in a problematic place in respect of the atmosphere. Where improvement may be required is in moving from splashdown, where we sink space junk in the ocean, to targeted recovery.

[1] https://starlink-stories.cdn.prismic.io/starlink-stories/Z3Q...

[2] https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-elon-musk-next-gen-starlink...

[3] https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/asteroid-fast-fa...

Y-bar• 10 months ago

Asking from a place of ignorance on my part, but does the chemical composition of the satellites versus asteroids/dust have any adverse effects?

SoftTalker• 10 months ago

The satellites are mostly metal and silicon I would guess, not too different from asteroids.

perihelions3• 10 months ago

It's postulated that the high aluminum content of satellites (for perspective, Bennu samples are only 1% Al), as oxidized Al2O3 particles in the stratosphere, catalyze chemistry that destroys ozone. But that's far from a quantitatively meaningful problem, at the current scale.

This source[0] says satellite reentries are about about 12% of the space industry's contribution to ozone depletion (the big one is chlorine from solid rockets), which in turn is 0.1% of the entire anthropogenic contribution; i.e. satellite reentries are ~0.01% of the total.

https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-reentry-pollution-dama...

svmt• 10 months ago

Bloomberg ran a piece about this in March: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellit...

nicce7• 10 months ago

There is a limit how much satellites LEO/GEO can hold unless every satellite has perfect dodging system. Called as Kessler syndrome [1], and one estimate is around 70k satellites. So it is a race who can get the most satellites orbiting, because after a certain point, there is no "space" anymore, and anyone who tries to launch after that point, will be blamed for destroying the satellites of the others. Winner takes all.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

dgs_sgd• 10 months ago

I’m just a layman, but why can’t they increase the orbital radius to solve this problem? Like, if the current “layer” is too full, have the new satellites orbit further out?

01HNNWZ0MV43FF3• 10 months ago

A land grab. That might explain the desire to put anything in space, even something useless like mirrors to reflect sunlight

ricardobeat• 10 months ago

That’s one single estimate, and the problem is much more nuanced.

For example, Starlink satellites orbit so low, that even if every single one of them collides and becomes dust, it will all decay and burn up in a matter of months, a couple years at most. The debris cannot physically move to higher orbits to affect other “normal” satellites, though it might impair launches.

Conversely, collisions at much higher geosynchronous orbits can’t possibly create a dense debris field as the total area is immense, deorbit will take millions of years, and everything is usually moving at the same speed (the synchronous part).

peterfirefly2• 10 months ago

Starlink's orbits are so low that everything deorbits automatically. The satellites need to actively work to stay up. That means no Kessler syndrome there.

How many you can fit depends on the available technology. It should eventually be a lot more than 70K just in those low orbits... and still leave plenty of space for rocket launches and returns to thread their way in between them.

wat10000• 10 months ago

A 2-10% increase seems like a hell of a lot.

Human CO2 emissions are well under 10% of natural CO2 emissions, and yet that additional amount has been enough to increase the atmospheric concentration of CO2 by over 50% and substantially alter the planetary climate.

CO2 in the atmosphere is at a vastly larger scale than mass falling in from space, so that doesn't mean this is a problem, but that percentage certainly seems to indicate that the question should be studied further.

ogig• 10 months ago

I hear 10% increase on a global constant and that doesn't sound like peanuts. If we increase 10% each few years that might be a problem? I don't know anything about whatever field studies this but given that LEO constellations born yesterday even that 2% increase in stuff coming from the skyes sounds significant to me.

JumpCrisscross41• 10 months ago

Short answer is we're still theorizing. Models suggest we might see accumulation. But we might not, or it might not accumulate at relevant altitudes. (Current LEO satellites burn up before hitting the ozone layer.)

shizcakes• 10 months ago

edit: okay I misunderstood what everyone meant

SecretDreams• 10 months ago

The same could have been said about pollution from the industrial revolution compounding and hurting the atmosphere, but that never played out, right???

cowpig• 10 months ago

Why is a 2-10% increase a small amount? What increase would be too much?

benjiro2• 10 months ago

(They’re currently “around 260 and 310 kilograms” [2].)

v1.5 is like 300kg, the v2.0 mini (ironic as its far from mini compared to its predecessors) are 800kg.

The V3's are the one's that need StarShip to deploy. But the current launch platform can take 21x v2.0 Mini's per launch vs the 60x v1.5's they did before.

Taking in account that the v2.0 Mini's are way more capably on a kg/capacity. And the tech keeps getting better. SpaceX does not really need Starship, that is more or less a bonus at this point.

perihelions3• 10 months ago

"SpaceX does not really need Starship, that is more or less a bonus at this point."

Starship is the moat SpaceX needs to be developing today to stay ahead of where the Chinese competition will be in 5-10 years.

matthewdgreen• 10 months ago

See the first comment in this thread about aluminum oxide and the ozone layer. It’s not so much the amount, but what it is.

trenbologna• 10 months ago

Does this create pollution? I don't think I want to inhale satellite dust.

mrguyorama• 10 months ago

Unfortunately right now we just don't know how it will affect things.

But, it WILL affect things in climate and atmosphere.

https://csl.noaa.gov/news/2025/427_0428.html

"Pollution" is what this is

metalman• 10 months ago

The real world concentrations of all of the elements that are in a satelite, dont go up by any measurable amount dues to space X sattelites burning up. What does have a huge impact is climate change causing industrial waste sites to dry up and spread dust, or just the inevitable increaes due to more human activity and mining for our resouce heavy consumption, especialy anything with chips, and batteries, exotic alloys in screens

ggreer3• 10 months ago

Current Starlink satellites are 800-970kg[1] and 100% of their mass is vaporized on reentry, so 1-2 satellites a day would be approximately 1.5 tons per day added to the atmosphere. The atmosphere's mass is 5.15 quadrillion tons. Even if satellite vapor stayed in the atmosphere forever, it would take approximately 10,000 years before it reached 1 part per billion.

So basically it's not worth worrying about.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#v2_(initial_deploymen...

Veedrac2• 10 months ago

This is correct from the perspective of direct health hazards, but there are still plausible risks. We know from history you don't need a lot of mass to cause global problems, if the material is catalytic.

dimal• 10 months ago

Yet?

My point is, Starlink is doing this now, but they are continuing to scale up. Other companies are going to follow. Is there a point that this does become something to worry about because the scale has increased?

advisedwang2• 10 months ago

The launches are probably significantly worse!

JumpCrisscross41• 10 months ago

launches are probably significantly worse

Kerosene rockets produce soot. Methalox rockets (like Starship) produce plain CO2 and water.

ActorNightly• 10 months ago

At this point, Im just waiting to find out that Falcon launches aren't actually that much cheaper in reality, and are just heavily subsidized.

adastra223• 10 months ago

You'll be waiting a long time, because that is simply not true.

inemesitaffia30• 10 months ago

And is literally Russian propaganda older than the 2022 Ukraine invasion.

chermi11• 10 months ago

[flagged]

londons_explore3• 10 months ago

0.018% of the worlds population have starlink subscriptions.

Yet 100% put up with the atmospheric pollution of a lot of mass being plasmified on the way back to earth, the light pollution, the lack of other services delivered with that spectrum, etc.

One might ask how the 99.982% of us will be compensated.

loeg2• 10 months ago

Personally, I've never suffered from satellite plasma or light pollution from satellites, or spectrum allocation. I suspect most of the 100% are like me.

oceanplexian2• 10 months ago

A single terminal could serve an entire African village. It's also serving use cases in the Ukraine war, ships at sea, Antarctic research stations, numerous aerospace and military use cases, and so on. DTC is provide texting and emergency services to countless people who might need it in an emergancy, like we saw in North Carolina.

Last and most importantly, Starlink exists is to create revenue for SpaceX and to fund the Starship program. The value to humanity of Starship succeeding at its goals is extremely high.

xnx2• 10 months ago

Could we say the same about flights to Hawaii? Small number of people take lavish vacations, everyone else gets the pollution.

It's good to look at the costs vs. benefits of everything, but satellite networks are way far down on my list of concern (and I do some astrophotography).

runarberg14• 10 months ago

Also worth considering is the Uber effect of public infrastructure. Meaning that politicians may use the existence of StarLink as an excuse to delay or cancel public projects which would otherwise have delivered broadband internet to under-served areas via traditional infrastructure.

This is similar to how the existence of Uber has caused delays or cancellation of public transit projects because politicians were able to say the people were better served with Uber than public transit.

chermi11• 10 months ago

I'd wager many of those connections are serving much more than one person, considering they're often hubs in rural areas. But screw them.

It's interesting how if it's anti-elon, it's ok to complain about how the poor are causing the privileged some difficulties.

j452• 10 months ago

It's less about percentage.

Economic opportunity is largely shifting towards not only having internet access, but performant internet access.

Costs will come down. There will be alternatives.

But they might have taken much longer to come to market without something like this.

I'm not a fanboy, but there's obviously a lot of people who have worked hard to make Starlink a reality.

gtsop• 10 months ago

Or you know, we could use wires..

thrance2• 10 months ago

Musk and his right-wing propaganda platform plays a big part in the destruction of Western democracy. He deserves the hate he is receiving. Providing internet to an insignificant fraction of the global population does not even begin to offset that.

Fairburn• 10 months ago

No, not because of Elon. But I can see how you think so.

dang• 10 months ago

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

chermi11• 10 months ago

Thanks, you're right.

superkuh• 10 months ago

Short lifetime and quick re-entry is a great feature of vLEO constellations. No long term space junk. Compare that to MEO or GEO where sats are there pretty much forever (hundreds to thousands of years). Or even high LEO with many tens of years.

whazor• 10 months ago

Yes, it is much better to error on the side of losing satellites, versus making future space travel impossible.

JumpCrisscross41• 10 months ago

versus making future space travel impossible

Not a real thing. (It was proposed as a possibility. We searched the parameter space. Mostly in the context of militaries trying to figure out how to deny orbits to an adversary. It's really difficult, to the point that even if one were intentionally trying to cause Kessler cascades, they wouldn't deny an adversary access to orbit.)

randyrand• 10 months ago

It’s weird to hear the term “forever” to refer to thousands of years in the context of space.

micromacrofoot• 10 months ago

It sure would be nice if we found out if this mattered before it does.

josefritzishere2• 10 months ago

I am not convinced that Starlink will continue to exist long term. They reported break even in 2023 but I don't think that included the ongoing cost of replacing satillites.

adastra223• 10 months ago

Their accounting does include that cost.

bryanlarsen4• 10 months ago

They reported cash flow positive. "Cash flow positive" is a much stronger statement than "profitable" because it doesn't let you play games with amortization. So it included the ongoing cost of replacing satellites plus 100% costs of putting up new ones for future use where normal accounting would allow you to amortize those costs.

SpaceX is obviously quite profitable. They're obviously spending many billions annually on salaries, Starlink launches and Starship development yet they haven't raised significant money via debt or equity financing rounds in the last few years.

mothballed• 10 months ago

Starlink is operated by Starlink Services, LLC which allows SpaceX to play all sorts of accounting tricks by mixing in engineered contracts with SpaceX.

josefritzishere2• 10 months ago

Starlink is not publicly traded. That lowers the bar on transparency so we're all relying on estimates and press releases which are mostly marketing vehicles. Absent rela quarterly financial reports I think most of this is still in the realm of opinion.

GuB-42• 10 months ago

Starlink has to continue existing.

That's how SpaceX justifies its launch capabilities. Their strategy of using assembly line techniques to build reusable rockets make no sense unless there is a lot of stuff to launch. Satellites are crazy expensive, and the launch represents only a smaller part of the total budget, so even if the launch was free, there is only so much demand.

Starlink is more than half of SpaceX launches, building their own demand.

And replacing satellites regularly was the plan. I don't know how they did their report, but they certainly budgeted it internally. SpaceX is a private company, they tell you what they want to tell you.

inemesitaffia30• 10 months ago

SpaceX was a top launch company pre Starlink.

asadotzler5• 10 months ago

This year will generate whole digit billions of actual profit. Every satellite they launch, including replacements, increases those profits.

Fischgericht22• 10 months ago

[Disclaimer: Not a hater, just a Nerd looking at data.]

And just as Tesla's stock goes up whenever there are reports about them no longer selling cars, or being years behind on self-driving tech and robotics... if Starlink would be publicly traded, their stock would now shoot way up.

On a more serious note: If analysts would do their job, they could have found out years ago that Starlink will never ever be profitable, just as no Sat ISP in history ever has been. All always have and are funded with tax-payer money.

Why is that? Simple maths.

Including R&D and launch cost and expected usage time, the TCO of one of their satellites will be somewhere in the area of $2,000,000. One of them in theory has a peak speed of 100 GBit/s. If you overbook the link by a factor of 10 as it is common for an ISP, that gives you 1,000 Gbit/s to sell.

So in best case over the lifetime of the system you will make a revenue of 1,000 * $100 * 36 months. So you end up somewhere in the area of $3,600,000. Yes, that is more than $2,000,000, but well, there are a couple of billions of investments and investor money here to be paid back one day.

"But why are you only assuming a usage time of 3 years?"

While Musk's idea of rapid R&D cycles is fine for Software, it's extremely expensive. The "Oops, the Sat-to-Sat links are not working, so we now have to build base stations everywhere and can not do load distribution" might have cost Starlink something like $10 BILLION? I guess I would have tested my stuff first before launching it. With now two generations of Starlink sats already being outdated and/or falling from the sky, the "in two weeks" promises from Musk don't make me very confident that Starlink v3 will actually be properly tested prior to polluting space with their buggy trash again.

But let's restart it in a much simpler way: A currently used commercial fiber cable can do 800 GBit/s, so eight times of a Starlink Satellite. Real-life data has already proven that the lifespan (outdated transceivers etc) is somewhere around 5-8 years, with the biggest risk being your cable getting cut. The cable itself costs virtually nothing. Due to this "developing" countries have mostly decided to not lay fiber underground. In Thailand for example, the fiber cables are simply thrown onto houses and through the jungle, as replacing them is dirt cheap. Anyway: If you map this to the TCO on 3 years as mapped above, this means compared to the TCO of $2,000,000 for Starlink, for fiber you are looking at something in the area of $10,000 instead. It's a no-brainer.

Real-life proof: I live on a tiny and very very remote Island in Asia. Some people used to have Starlink here. But due to their Satellites now being massively overbooked, speeds went down months to months. So people noticed that it is actually cheaper to run 10 KILOMETERS / 6 Miles of Fiber cable through the jungle. And on this tiny remote Island there are three Fiber ISPs to choose from. Two of them offer 1 GBit/s for $13 per month, and if you want a business service, for $40 you can get 2 GBit/s down / 1 GBit/s up. And unlike Starlink those ISPs are profitable.

You have to be EXTREMELY remote for Sat internet to make sense. No, not rural USA. Fiber will be cheaper. No, not Africa. Fiber through the desert will be cheaper. Sat Internet may make sense if you live in the artic or on mount Everest or something like that. Or Mars. In all other cases the TCO of Fiber will win.

JumpCrisscross41• 10 months ago

"But why are you only assuming a usage time of 3 years?"

Your entire analysis rests on this point, which you fail to demonstrate. (You also cite zero sources, which isn't encouraging.)

(EDIT: This assumption is conservative, but reasonable.)

Was this AI generated?

The cable itself costs virtually nothing

Did you attempt to look up the cost of laying new fibre trunk?

due to their Satellites now being massively overbooked, speeds went down months to months

Then this isn't a remote location. Starlink's economics have been pretty obvious for anyone who has been on a plane, boat or train in the last decade. They're also terrifically useful for remote mining, observation and military operations.

people noticed that it is actually cheaper to run 10 KILOMETERS / 6 Miles of Fiber cable through the jungle

Well sure, if you ignore negative exernalities a lot of stuff is cheap.

stronglikedan• 10 months ago

Was this AI generated?

It's crazy to me that people use AI to generate comments for social sites of all things, but here we are.

Fischgericht22• 10 months ago

Wow. Well, I believe that YOU are a bot, not me. Are you Grok?

Anyway, yes, I am a human.

And it is not that hard to find the sources for this point:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshiel...

v1 constellation was completed in 2021, and decommissioned from 2024. v2 deployed from 2023, but the sat-to-sat communication is not working, so all of them, will need to be replaced by v3, too.

TheAlchemist5• 10 months ago

That's also my opinion - it will probably never be profitable - it's a great product, but the economics are not right - and that's why no other provider did this (even though they have the tech).

Let's see what happens once the bubble pops.

JumpCrisscross41• 10 months ago

once the bubble pops

What's the bubble? It's cash-flow positive. All of SpaceX is cash-flow positive--they've been buying back their own shares.

You can argue it's overrated, i.e. customers will drop it after trying it for a while. (Or when a recession forces their hand.) But bubble requires leverage and losses, neither of which SpaceX (or Starlink) have.

wmf2• 10 months ago

Analysts that I've seen estimate that Starlink is already profitable and will remain so. Unless you can explain the differences between your math and their math, this is yet another Elon-hating conspiracy theory.

JumpCrisscross41• 10 months ago

this is yet another Elon-hating conspiracy theory

Nothing in their analysis is conspiratorial. It's flawed. But not alleging conspiracy.

Fischgericht22• 10 months ago

Gimme your source URL, please.

As others have pointed out already in this thread: No serious analyst and not even Starlink themselves have claimed to be profitable. They have claimed to be operationally profitable. This means that the cost of operating the sats is lower than the revenue they make. It does leave out all other cost. Yes, if they could build and launch the Sats for free instead of ~$2 million per piece, that could be a profitable business.

Also, have you actually used Starlink? It's crap. Yes, in 2023 when they did not have customers you got decent speeds. Now it's completely overbooked. Yes, you can make a year of profits milking existing customers.

Google "Starlink benchmark" or "Starlink feedback" etc and you will see things like these:

https://www.trustpilot.com/review/starlink.com

At this point Starlink's active customer base is rating their service to be worse than... cancer, I guess?

ahmeneeroe-v2• 10 months ago

are funded with tax-payer money

This has nothing to do with profitability. DoD/War Dept contracts are "tax payer money" and shareholders are happy to have those.

it is actually cheaper to run 10 KILOMETERS / 6 Miles of Fiber cable through the jungle

Cheaper, sure. But try getting this approved in the US through a County Planning Commission. And you did get NEPA/CEQA done too right?

No, not rural USA. Fiber will be cheaper.

My not-that-rural town has fiber only 80% of town. Houses with city sewer/water don't have fiber

Fischgericht22• 10 months ago

All of this is regulatory stuff. Your state has the option of making it expensive and a PITA or not.

In my ex home town in Germany we had the exact same thing as you are describing - Fiber available everywhere up to 20 meters away from our house, and no chance to get it connected. For purely regulatory reasons.

lxgr16• 10 months ago

The "Oops, the Sat-to-Sat links are not working, so we now have to build base stations everywhere and can not do load distribution" might have cost Starlink something like $10 BILLION? I guess I would have tested my stuff first before launching it. With now two generations of Starlink sats already being outdated and/or falling from the sky

You don't seem to understand their strategy: Constant replacement is a feature, not a bug, to them.

And in that paradigm, why wait any longer than absolutely necessary with any given launch? The problem is already fixed – at least inter-satellite links seem to be working well enough now (as evidenced by global coverage on the oceans).

Starlink will never ever be profitable, just as no Sat ISP in history ever has been.

How do you explain the non-zero stock price of e.g. Iridium and Viasat?

You have to be EXTREMELY remote for Sat internet to make sense. No, not rural USA. Fiber will be cheaper.

Are you sure laying fiber to every last home is really more capital efficient in the long term? Have you done the math on that side too?

And what about mobile coverage? Even solar-powered low maintenance cell stations need to be installed, repaired after storms, have their solar cells dusted off etc.

No, not Africa. Fiber through the desert will be cheaper. Sat Internet may make sense if you live in the artic or on mount Everest or something like that.

Mount Everest has pretty good cell signal, as far as I know. It's a tiny area, compared to actually remote but still (sparsely) populated regions.

Fischgericht22• 10 months ago

Due to the nature of the business I am in I very well know Viasats customer base. They are too important to fail for multiple european military organizations.

As discussed elsewhere in this thread, the intra-links still do not seem to be enabled. Can not verify myself due not having a yacht and/or time, but I am constantly flying between Asia and Europe with various airlines, and so far none of them have switched to Starlink but keep paying the outrageous pricing from ViaSat & co.

Zufriedenheit• 10 months ago

Can this become dangerous for airplanes? Or are they fully burned up before reaching that low altitude?

naberhausj• 10 months ago

This article [1] indicates that they burn up at altitudes between 37-50 miles above the surface. If so, that's well above the 40,000' that planes normally fly.

[1] https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-reentry-pollution-dama...

Rebelgecko2• 10 months ago

There's typically only a small amount of matter that makes it down intact, and they usually aim to deorbit in the middle of nowhere (eg Point Nemo)

dostick• 10 months ago

That means there must be launching to orbit equivalent replacement, not daily of course.

darknavi• 10 months ago

Indeed, SpaceX often has multiple launches of Starlink sats a week.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...

ignoramous• 10 months ago

A launch every 3 days all throughout 2025. Simply incredible.

varenc2• 10 months ago

This article has a somewhat alarmist tone, but isn't this just Starlink working as intended?

It seems much better for an old non-functional Starlink satellite to burn up in the atmosphere instead of continuing in an uncontrolled orbit. I believe most burn-ups are controlled intentional deorbits.

benjiro2• 10 months ago

Yep, those are the original / older gen sats, that have way less capacity then the newer models. They are moving away from tons of small sats and more to larger (with longer life time) sats that have multiple times the capacity, of the combined smaller sats.

Quoting a older post i made on the subject:

-------

Take in account, that a lot of those are replacement sats for the first generations that they are deorbiting already. Do not quote me on this, but its a insane amount (i though it was around 2k) of the first generation that they are deorbiting. If there is a issue, its not the amount of sats in space, but more the insane amount of deorbiting StarLink is doing.

Starlink wanted to put up insane numbers, but a lot of their fights contain a large percentage of replacement sats.

And they are getting bigger ... v1.5 is like 300kg, the v2.0 mini (ironic as its far from mini compared to its predecessors) are 800kg.

So before StarLink launched 60x v1.5's but now they are doing 21x v2.0 Mini's per launch.

The technology has been improving a lot, allowing for a lot more capacity per satellite. Not sure when they start launching v3's but those have like 3x the capacity for inner connects/ground stations and can go up to 1Gbit speeds (compared to the v2's who are again much more capable then multiple v1.5s).

So what we are seeing is less satellites per launch but more capacity per sat. This year is the last year that they are doing mass 1.5 launches, its all now going to the v2.0 "mini" (so 3x less sats).

smallerize• 10 months ago

They keep the satellites relatively low for latency, and that means they still need a lot of them for line-of-sight coverage, right? They have plans to add 15,000 more satellites. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/starlinks-ambiti...

jacquesm2• 10 months ago

Deorbiting the v 1.5 has a far lower chance of anything hitting the ground than the bigger ones.

rtpg• 10 months ago

But if they're adding larger capacity ones that still have the same failure mode, then the "1 to 2 a day" becomes even worse right?

Or are those larger ones also ones that have a longer shelf life?

rjbwork2• 10 months ago

Are there not concerns with burning up multiple agglomerations of metal, plastics, and ceramics the size of a small car in the upper atmosphere every day?

CydeWeys• 10 months ago

The deorbits are controlled to occur over nonpopulated areas (i.e. the middle of the ocean). I don't think it amounts to much of a concern, compared to, say, the sum total emissions of all factories, power plants, ships, airplanes, and vehicles.

brookst• 10 months ago

Wonder how it compares to the volume and elements of the meteorites we’re constantly hitting?

ChatGPT says we get between 50 and 100 metric tons of material a day, mostly silicates and iron/nickel metals.

asadotzler5• 10 months ago

Not really. What are your concerns?

xenadu02• 10 months ago

Modern end-of-life satellite designs are made to cause "rapid disassembly" very high up in the atmosphere to trigger high friction on as many individual components as possible - down to fasteners. This promotes completely re-entry burn up of everything so what reaches the surface is dust that settles back down to the surface (or ocean floor) and eventually gets compressed into rock (over millions of years). Basically back to where it came from.

Remember orbit is not like a flying airplane. Those things are going so fast friction forms a plasma that eats away at the object as it decelerates. If you can expose more surface area that effect will eat away at much more of the object. So you design it to have through-bolts or other fastener designs where the outermost portion of the fastener burns off quickly, allowing the whole assembly to rapidly disassemble and vastly increase surface area.

cubefox2• 10 months ago

This article has a somewhat alarmist tone, but isn't this just Starlink working as intended?

The unexpected accumulation of metals in the stratosphere, discussed in the article, is clearly not intended.

It seems much better for an old non-functional Starlink satellite to burn up in the atmosphere instead of continuing in an uncontrolled orbit. I believe most burn-ups are controlled intentional deorbits.

This is irrelevant to metals like aluminium accumulating in the stratosphere.

reactordev2• 10 months ago

Indeed, working as intended. SpaceX said at the beginning that this was how they would “clean up” older gen sats.

gitaarik• 10 months ago

Is this a common approach? Seems strange this happens on such a scale now without much scrutiny.

Rebelgecko2• 10 months ago

The reentry thing is more or less intentional.

There's this meme about how only recently launched starlink satellites are problematic for astronomy, but when people bring it up they usually don't mention that by virtue of the constellation's size and reentry frequency there's always going to be a bunch of recently launched satellites.

fred_is_fred• 10 months ago

NOAA said the stratosphere contains an unexpected quantity of particles with a variety of exotic metals. The scientists believe the particles come from satellites and spent rocket boosters as they are vaporized by the intense heat of reentry.

My start-up is called Strato Mines - collecting rare earths from 120km above earth. Willing to give 1% at a 100B valuation to any qualified investor.

allenrb• 10 months ago

Man, I dream of living in a world in which our biggest (or even a top-10) environmental concern is “debris from LEO burning up in the atmosphere”.

Yes, most of us are pretty angry at/disappointed in Elon these days but there are better places to focus than this.

aaomidi• 10 months ago

Some chemicals can be extremely potent climate problems. Starlink does represent an astronomical increase in these metals etc in the atmosphere.

asadotzler5• 10 months ago

Not really. It's a tiny fraction of the same potent ones that come from meterioids, and unimaginably small compared to what just the relatively few solid rocket booster launches. If you're concerned about aluminum oxide's impact on the ozone, you need to lobby for the end of solid rocket boosters log before you even consider demising satellites.

ecommerceguy2• 10 months ago

"What’s not usual is the atmospheric fallout. The fiery re-entry of even one Gen1 Starlink satellite produces about 30 kilograms of aluminum oxide vapor, a compound that erodes the ozone layer. A new study finds these oxides have increased 8-fold between 2016 and 2022, and the Great Re-entry Event increases this pollution even more.

To put this into perspective: Before the first Starlink launches began in 2019, only about 40 to 50 satellites re-entered per year. SpaceX just brought down ten years' worth in only six months, adding an estimated 15,000 kilograms of aluminum oxide to the upper atmosphere."

https://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=05&month=08&...

Shout out to NEKAAL for watching the skys and keeping our little speck of dust a bit safer from the vast reality of space.

terminalshort• 10 months ago

The fact that they quantified everything here except for the amount of ozone this actually destroys tells me that it's completely insignificant.

ecommerceguy2• 10 months ago

I'll refrain my usual snark and just link the same link from the linked article you apparently read.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024JD04...

mensetmanusman• 10 months ago

Earth receives ~50,000 kg/day of cosmic dust (our mid-range assumption), 30 kg is 0.06% of that daily amount.

burnt-resistor• 10 months ago

But how much of that is aluminum? Probably <0.5%.

Nit: You're off by about a factor of 3 because it's 14.6 t/day.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/antarctic-study-s...

a_bonobo• 10 months ago

This is kind of that 'climate change skeptic' argument that CO2 is only a tiny percentage in the atmosphere, 0.04%, so anything humans have done to that tiny percentage is therefore negligible. But we've had a massive impact by increasing that tiny percentage by 50% causing climate change.

lithocarpus3• 10 months ago

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...

Apparently earth soaks up ~400-800 kg of aluminum oxide in cosmic dust each day.

So with 1-2 starlink satellites producing 30kg each dissipate each day, that's adding about 10% to this figure.

I'm not sure if the cosmic dust aluminum finds itself in the same places up there as the dissipating starlink aluminum. Maybe that could be figured out from the above paper.

This could have a significant effect, I don't know.

prennert• 10 months ago

wow your post gave me a bit of perspective. The distribution might really matter here.

Are those ~400-800 kg of aluminum oxide in cosmic dust each day uniformly distributed, and if not how big are those clouds of aluminum oxide that the earth is travelling through? Those 30kg from the satellites are going to be extremely concentrated and therefore take longer to "soak up".

varenc2• 10 months ago

How much ozone is being destroyed by 15000kg of aluminum oxide vapor? Is it a meaningful amount?

On the scale of the Earth, my completely uninformed intuition is that 15k kg of alumina doesn't feel that significant. I'd guess that rocket production and launch emissions are way more harmful. But don't know.

casenmgreen• 10 months ago

IIRC there recently was a white paper about the environmental affects of the metallization of the upper atmosphere by satellites - not just those burning up, but the general emission over time of tiny particles of metal from all satellites.

However, quick Google now I can find research which has determined pure rare earth metals in the upper atmosphere coming from satellites and boosters and so on, but nothing about the consequences, and I thought I recalled something about consequences.

_heimdall• 10 months ago

If we're really concerned with heavy metals and particulates added to the atmosphere we should also be considering all of the weather modification projects that go on effectively unregulated.

NOAA collects reports[1] of what is done in the US but they don't officially regulate it. They currently have 1,113 reports publicly available.

[1] https://library.noaa.gov/weather-climate/weather-modificatio...

asadotzler5• 10 months ago

If this worries you, ban solid rocket boosters before you ban satellites. The real ozone damage from the space industry is not demising satellites, it's solid rocket booster pollution.

hcfman• 10 months ago

Are they hot enough to cause forest fires when they hit the ground? I can't imagine that they would completely vaporize from that low orbit.

kenmacd• 10 months ago

"Oh no: There's metal satellites falling from orbit! Also: wanna buy a metal coin, they were sent to the edge of space!". I find the juxtaposition more amusing then I probably should.

One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

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