That is a very deceptive video/article (at least the first half above the paywall). It is true that a few of these sats will have to come down each day, but the video is of a booster failure/explosion, not a normal planned obsolescence sat re-entry.
And re-entry is part of the cleanup plan. All satellites responsibly launched need a plan to deal with possible orbital waste. By decommissioning in this way, we're reducing overall impact of the constellation.
Given the immense possible good worldwide internet can provide, and the virtuous cycle it creates for the US launch industry, it's really hard to take these claims seriously.
It is impossible to make any improvement without some impact. We're way, way past any real problems when discussing a few 100kg of metal falling into the upper atmosphere every day.
Growth versus preservation. India is trashing its air quality burning coal near its cities. Yet that power is lifting millions out of poverty and into the world's second-largest middle class.
Everyone would prefer clean air ceteris paribus. But for a lot of those people, economic security is "more important than preserving the environment."
I believe that an atmosphere compatible with human life is a bit more useful than internet by satelite. The fact that the impact of re-entry of satelites is absolute insane. Any good engineering company would study the whole impact of scaling up before doing so. The fact that spacex didn't do that is really worrying and regulation should come to stop what they are doing asap until the impact is better understood. Some more serious engineers at Japan aerospace are studying wooden satelite which is a quite approach to the problem.
I am not aware of threats to the atmosphere from the entry at a 100kg/day scale. And nobody is. At this point risks are hypothetical to the ozone or other layers.
if the aersols do cause any problems we're done for quite a while as they do not seem to come down. As I understand it the amount of aerosol will be quite significant in this layer of athmosphere. https://csl.noaa.gov/news/2025/427_0428.html
if you combine all the fallen starlink satellites and the debris/waste they produce in a year, it comes down to about less than 0.1% of what the earth receives from space in the same year
Okay, that makes sense. The reading I did indicated that the composition of the man-made mass is very different, and could greatly elevate the amount of certain elements released in the upper atmosphere, like aluminum. Is this not cause for concern?
The worst thing about space exploration is that it's not fun and optimistic like it was before this specific 2020s phase of capitalism, the best thing is that this crop of billionaires will all be dead before the real cool future stuff could happen anyway.
They're planning to live forever. All of them are investing in longevity research & some of them are young enough to live to see a few breakthroughs that might meaningfully extend their lifespan.
Why assume it's people who can't Google down voting and not Russian and Chinese plants. There's all kinds of topics on here that trigger a down voting campaign that works pretty well on non top comments.
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it's always privatize the profits, socialize the costs
he's doing the same thing with Starlink which is going to vaporize many thousands of toxic satellites out of LEO into the atmosphere
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellit...
imagine what he's going to do on the Moon or Mars