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Comment by lupusreal | Hacker News Reader

Tired of these ignorant gripes from people who think they know better than the entire space industry because they ingested some popsci trash on reddit or youtube. If you actually knew anything you would know that LEO constellations are far less risky than the old school method of putting communication satellites in high orbits like GEO (where any accident means orbital debris which will effectively never decay.)

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The guy who thought of the Kessler syndrome was a respected scientist in the space community and he was specifically speaking of LEO. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

I think there's worse effects though. Like the impact on astronomy.. SpaceX has done a few things to minimise the effect but there is still an effect.

The Kessler syndrome is a hypothetical phenomenon that could possibly occur under the wrong circumstances. But inference with astronomy is happening now.

For the uninitiated, what this comment means is that LEO-orbiting payloads have a naturally limited lifespan as the orbit decays over time on its own causing the LEO satellites to get closer to earth and burn down to smithereens due to friction with the atmosphere.

This is why Starlink keeps launching new satellites on the regular. I believe theirs have a six years lifespan but don’t quote me on that.

It also provides a bunch of real life experience for the company in launching rockets rather than being this rare occurrence they can iterate faster and fix problems as they go. Due to this, Falcon9 matured very quickly in my opinion

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