Low Earth Orbit Satellites Cause Environmental Harm Regulators Didnt Prepare For

The actual paper:

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL10...

It adds up from the previous one that raises the concern, and now it does chemical simulation to discover what remains from the satellites.

AFAIK, the conclusions are still not enough to determine if this is bad. But now that this paper is done, one can do the simulation (or extrapolate observed data) that discovers it.

Stratospheric Al2O3 aerosols from space exploration are a phenomenon studied since at least the 1980's. Space Shuttle pollution probably dwarfs all of these modern sources, since aluminum was the primary fuel for the STS solid rocket boosters (about 160 tons Al per launch if I mathed right).

- "The most probable source of the increasingly abundant classes of stratospheric particles are aerospace activities. As these activities increase, so will the flux of anthropogenic material into the atmosphere[Kessler, 1985; Johnson,1985]. It is possible to predict the composition of these particles from a knowledge of the most commonly used spacecraft materials. There should be four main sources for solid particulate aerospace material in the stratosphere.These are (1) solid rocket fuel exhaust, (2) solid rocket motor (SRM) ablation, (3) thermal reflective paint from the outer hulls of spacecraft,and (4) ablating hardware from satellites and discarded rocket sections in low-Earth orbit."

- "It is well known that solid rocket fuel containing an aluminum additive produces spherical grains composed predominently of alumina when burned, and these particles have previously been noted among stratospheric particle collections [Brownlee et ai., 1976; Zolensky and Mackinnon, 1985]. The use of SRMs has increased steadily since the advent of the space shuttle, in 1981, to a peak in 1985."

https://sci-hub.se/10.1029/jd094id01p01047 ("A tenfold increase in the abundance of large solid particles in the stratosphere, as measured over the period 1976–1984" (1989))

I don't buy for one second the sudden urgency to halt critical US/NATO military space capabilities for a phenomenon that's been studied for 40+ years with no obvious major issues.

Without seriously discussing the scale, the effects, and other sources… this sure seems like just scientifically-veiled Musk-Hate.

So we're ushering in a new era of advanced communication and research for a... 6x increase in aluminum oxide in the ozone layer?

Easy trade no problem. Will do it 100x times over again.

What’s missing from this article: Any sense of proportion. It uses numbers that are large from any human perspective, but doesn’t say how they compare to the rest of civilisation, or nature.

"...it’s generally more economically and environmentally sound to prioritize the deployment of fiber..."

Um. Wat?

Cannot wait to hear the same author howling about environmental destruction as the most awful of the megacorps dig millions of miles of trenches to lay down fiber.

Also, unlike our scumbag trad ISPs, who constantly return to the subsidy trough and provide nothing of value, consider that maybe the financial calculus has been done by the people putting their own, actual dollars in on this one.

Finally, since the author is so concerned with the needs of the underprivileged, where's their outrage over the $14.4 BILLION dollars[0] that were wasted in a failed attempt to get the rural areas of the country connected?

[0] https://www.fcc.gov/acp