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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

Kessler syndrome is kind of a middlebrow concern people love to bring up because they heard about it one time, but I have yet to see any argument that it is a realistic problem for Starlink based on real calculations. The number of Starlink satellites is large compared to previous constellations, but still tiny compared to space which is of course vast. The low orbits used by Starlink are automatically cleaned up by the atmosphere. And even if there were debris clouds in low orbit it wouldn't lock out space access as it would still be possible to launch into higher orbits. The probability of collision is negligible if you're only passing through.

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> Kessler syndrome

Makes for pretty good anime though:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes

It makes more sense in their case, as they have a couple more magnitudes more orbital infrastructure. So much more stuff to hit and much much more mass to cause trouble.

for a brief period, it might even work as an ICBM defence shield for the whole planet. Imagine every single rocket aborting due to debris for 1-2 years( a guess)

You're underestimating how huge the surface area of the sphere these satellites are orbiting, and how little material they have. Even if you somehow blow them all up, they won't shield you from ICBMs.

And if the debris field somehow was dense enough to provide such a shield it would block out enough sunlight to cause the death of most life on the planet I suspect.

On the positive side, a solution for global warming.

If you blow up all starlink satelites, the resulting debris will start taking out other satelites.

… … … you mean it will cause Kessler Syndrome?

It seems that there's a threshold that would have to be hit to trigger that process. Do we have any idea whether starlink satellites, whether intact or as debris, would be anywhere close enough to that threshold to trigger the runaway process?

It could be true that the phenomenon exists conceptually, but that were nowhere near remotely close to triggering it, and that people are vastly underestimating the size of space.

If you blow up all the Starlink satellites, the little pieces start reentering the atmosphere most preferentially in very short order.

Kessler syndrome is more complicated than just "satellite debris bad". At the altitudes the Starlink satellites are at, it is a near non-concern. There is a causal link there... we can afford to put up lots of little satellites at that altitude for that exact reason, and that's exactly why they are where they are. That it's also less energetically expensive to launch is just a bonus.

ICBMs don't stay in space for long enough to be impacted.

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