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Comment by ggmartins | Hacker News Reader

We didn't fix the pollution of the ocean now we have to worry about the pollution of the space.

SpaceX moved the satellite orbits much lower to mitigate this concern. In their current low orbit, any broken satellites or debris will fall out of the sky within a few years due to atmospheric drag. The real concern is in higher orbits where debris would persist for millennia.

So now the cloud isn't just going to rain users' data, it's going to rain satellites too. Great.

The satellites are designed to completely burn up as they reenter the atmosphere. So it won't rain anything on the ground. And the mass of the satellites is minuscule compared to the mass of dust and meteors that fall into the Earth's atmosphere from space every day.

If we're not careful here we will give the anti-vax 5g conspiracy crowd another thing to ferment.

These satellites have de-orbit plans after they've served their lifetime use.

Yes, low orbit and disposable and planned obsolescence. Which I believe they have already live-tested the EOL burnup.

If even 1% of Starlink satellites crap out before their planned EOL, there could be hundreds or thousands of them left in orbit for hundreds of years after the constellation is inactive

It's not correct. They orbit low enough that unresponsive Starlink satellite will fall out within a coupe of years.

No way. Orbital decay times increase more or less exponentially, and once you get above the thermopause (which moves around from 500-1000km based upon terrestrial and space weather conditions), atmospheric drag becomes practically 0.

SpaceX is upfront about this in their FCC filings:

"The natural orbital decay of a satellite at 1,150 km requires hundreds of years to enter the Earth’s atmosphere"

All current satellites are in 550 km orbits. They had plans to also launch in 1150 km orbits but they made some FCC filings requesting to reduce the altitude.

That's great news, I hadn't heard that they requested to lower everything to 550km (fcc filing here for the curious: https://fcc.report/IBFS/SAT-MOD-20200417-00037/2274315)

On April SpaceX modified the architecture and submitted application to FCC proposing to operate more satellites in lower orbits. Previously they had approval to operate almost 3000 satellites in orbits between 1110-1300 km. Now the modified plan foresees 1500 satellites at altitudes between 540-570 km and another 7500 satellites in orbits around 345 km at later stages.

I dunno, space isn't a delicate eco-system like the oceans, so long-term I think industry and infrastructure in space is a much better idea than the same on earth.

Doesn't matter if you're emitting greenhouse gases if you're somewhere where there is no atmosphere.

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