11–20 of 24 posts
Anything could, a soyuz rocket exploding would invalidate any launches for the next 5 to 10 years. Boom and shards all over the atmosphere.
Seems like FUD to me. Consider that 11,000 satellite-sized objects are spread over the surface of the earth-- given an entire lifetime to search, how many do you think you could find? It helps a little to imagine it as people instead of objects. Imagine there are only 11,000 people on earth instead of 7 billion-- just the population of one small town, spread over all the oceans and all the continents. Do you think yo…
Surface area grows with the radius squared. Starlink are meant to be at (a max of) 1200km above the surface. Earth radius is 6371.
((6371 + 1200) / 6371)^2 = 1.41
There is 41% more surface area at their orbit than at sea level.
> The only real solution companies like SpaceX has when disposing of a satellite when it's outlived its usefulness is to let them get pulled into the atmosphere and burn up on re-entry, but when it comes to managing 12,000 of them at once (and 4,000 in higher orbits, where they're less likely to get pulled down naturally), how many will slip through the cracks? This is the only real solution anyone has. It’s just not…
Some thoughts:
- Putting 12000 big freezers (900 pounds at most) in orbit is never going to "crowd" the place; imagine these objects on Earth, then the claim that on a much higher radius sphere these could be seen at any point seems ridiculous. (I am not speaking about speed or dangerosity, which even up the numbers a bit, or powerful light-emitting projects)
- In that sense, the video displayed is annoyingly misleading.
- The danger of the Kessler effect is a long term one, and as such it seems purely economic to me. Increasing the number of space debris will gradually increase the probability of collisions, and raise the costs of space industry, in an upwards trend that may at some point represent a real financial burden. This is the only question: at which point does it become economically interesting to tackle this problem, and are we not underestimating the future costs at this point ?
- My take is not yet, and SpaceX will do fine managing their 12000 space fridges.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/nov/15/space-j...
> The only real solution companies like SpaceX has when disposing of a satellite when it's outlived its usefulness is to let them get pulled into the atmosphere and burn up on re-entry, but when it comes to managing 12,000 of them at once (and 4,000 in higher orbits, where they're less likely to get pulled down naturally), how many will slip through the cracks? This is the only real solution anyone has. It’s just not…
The entire premise of the article is daft and ignorant of basic orbital mechanics. The Starlink satellites will communicate with each other directly via laser. They can only do that by knowing very precisely where they and the other satellite are, so the whole constellation will have to be continuously tracked at high precision just to function at all.
Seems like FUD to me. Consider that 11,000 satellite-sized objects are spread over the surface of the earth-- given an entire lifetime to search, how many do you think you could find? It helps a little to imagine it as people instead of objects. Imagine there are only 11,000 people on earth instead of 7 billion-- just the population of one small town, spread over all the oceans and all the continents. Do you think yo…
The problem is that these 11000 objects are moving among the existing ones. Some are nearly stationary on a geostationary orbit, while the LEO objects tend to zip around on wildly different orbits. So they are not sitting there, waiting to be found, but each object has a certain chance each orbit to hit some other object. These probabilities go up the more we put in orbit.
Those satellites in the higher orbits require some care though. They wouldn't deorbit on their own and any space junk from collisions would stay around an extremely long time. For those sent up by SpaceX, there would be plenty of space, but if there are enough competing companies, things could get quite crowded. Of all people though, I would think that Elon is the most considerate about long-term environmental impact. After all, he doesn't want to block the path for his own Mars rockets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwWby884p6I
Like most mountains in Hawaii, it's on top of a volcano. So Madame Pele had to be appeased.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Surveillan...
It is also worth considering, that of the planned 12k satellites, only 4k will be in a higher orbit where long-living space junk can be created. The vast majority of the satellites will be in an orbit about 200 miles over ground where there is some minimal atmospheric drag, cleaning up any possible. Even without any other action taken, these satellites will reenter the atmosphere after 5-10 years on their own. Those…