It seems much better for an old non-functional Starlink satellite to burn up in the atmosphere instead of continuing in an uncontrolled orbit. I believe most burn-ups are controlled intentional deorbits.
Quoting a older post i made on the subject:
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Take in account, that a lot of those are replacement sats for the first generations that they are deorbiting already. Do not quote me on this, but its a insane amount (i though it was around 2k) of the first generation that they are deorbiting. If there is a issue, its not the amount of sats in space, but more the insane amount of deorbiting StarLink is doing.
Starlink wanted to put up insane numbers, but a lot of their fights contain a large percentage of replacement sats.
And they are getting bigger ... v1.5 is like 300kg, the v2.0 mini (ironic as its far from mini compared to its predecessors) are 800kg.
So before StarLink launched 60x v1.5's but now they are doing 21x v2.0 Mini's per launch.
The technology has been improving a lot, allowing for a lot more capacity per satellite. Not sure when they start launching v3's but those have like 3x the capacity for inner connects/ground stations and can go up to 1Gbit speeds (compared to the v2's who are again much more capable then multiple v1.5s).
So what we are seeing is less satellites per launch but more capacity per sat. This year is the last year that they are doing mass 1.5 launches, its all now going to the v2.0 "mini" (so 3x less sats).
The team I'm working with is just doing a cube sat which has pretty straightforward demising but overall it was interesting to see the thought and strategy that people put into this.
Or are those larger ones also ones that have a longer shelf life?
(~8,500 actively in orbit)
People used to think the oceans could just slurp up all of our garbage and plastic forever without a problem. Yet, here we are.
ChatGPT says we get between 50 and 100 metric tons of material a day, mostly silicates and iron/nickel metals.
Remember orbit is not like a flying airplane. Those things are going so fast friction forms a plasma that eats away at the object as it decelerates. If you can expose more surface area that effect will eat away at much more of the object. So you design it to have through-bolts or other fastener designs where the outermost portion of the fastener burns off quickly, allowing the whole assembly to rapidly disassemble and vastly increase surface area.
https://www.starlink.com/public-files/Starlink_Approach_to_S...
The unexpected accumulation of metals in the stratosphere, discussed in the article, is clearly not intended.
> It seems much better for an old non-functional Starlink satellite to burn up in the atmosphere instead of continuing in an uncontrolled orbit. I believe most burn-ups are controlled intentional deorbits.
This is irrelevant to metals like aluminium accumulating in the stratosphere.
There's this meme about how only recently launched starlink satellites are problematic for astronomy, but when people bring it up they usually don't mention that by virtue of the constellation's size and reentry frequency there's always going to be a bunch of recently launched satellites.