Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

earthsky.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 347 posts

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#21

Post by chermi »

londons_explore wrote: post #7
chermi wrote: post #6

[flagged]

0.018% of the worlds population have starlink subscriptions. Yet 100% put up with the atmospheric pollution of a lot of mass being plasmified on the way back to earth, the light pollution, the lack of other services delivered with that spectrum, etc. One might ask how the 99.982% of us will be compensated.

I'd wager many of those connections are serving much more than one person, considering they're often hubs in rural areas. But screw them.

It's interesting how if it's anti-elon, it's ok to complain about how the poor are causing the privileged some difficulties.

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#22

Post by SoftTalker »

Y-bar wrote: post #11
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #2

> Soon, McDowell told us, there will be up to 5 satellite reentries per day Starlink’s next-generation V3s, which will require Starship to launch, weigh in around 2 metric tonnes [1]. (They’re currently “around 260 and 310 kilograms” [2].) “Every day, Earth is bombarded with more than 100 tons [91 metric tons] of dust and sand-sized particles” [3]. So we’re talking about a 2 to 10% increase in burn-up by mass. (Not a…

Asking from a place of ignorance on my part, but does the chemical composition of the satellites versus asteroids/dust have any adverse effects?

The satellites are mostly metal and silicon I would guess, not too different from asteroids.

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#24

Post by leptons »

oceanplexian wrote: post #10
londons_explore wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0.018% of the worlds population have starlink subscriptions. Yet 100% put up with the atmospheric pollution of a lot of mass being plasmified on the way back to earth, the light pollution, the lack of other services delivered with that spectrum, etc. One might ask how the 99.982% of us will be compensated.

A single terminal could serve an entire African village. It's also serving use cases in the Ukraine war, ships at sea, Antarctic research stations, numerous aerospace and military use cases, and so on. DTC is provide texting and emergency services to countless people who might need it in an emergancy, like we saw in North Carolina. Last and most importantly, Starlink exists is to create revenue for SpaceX and to fund…

>The value to humanity of Starship succeeding at its goals is extremely high.

This does not benefit "humanity" at all, even if they do succeed. If a human colony on Mars is established, and all of humanity is wiped out on Earth, does it really benefit "humanity" or only the 0.000000001% of "humanity" located on Mars?

And life on Mars is going to be difficult, it isn't habitable, and is in fact quite hostile to life. I seriously doubt any colony on Mars would be viable long-term. If life on Earth is wiped out, the colony on Mars will very likely wither and die soon after without continued support from Earth.

Any colony on Mars is going to be so exponentially more fragile and fraught with problems for sustaining life, that the suggestion that it's somehow going to save humanity is ridiculous.

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#25

Post by runarberg »

chermi wrote: post #21
londons_explore wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0.018% of the worlds population have starlink subscriptions. Yet 100% put up with the atmospheric pollution of a lot of mass being plasmified on the way back to earth, the light pollution, the lack of other services delivered with that spectrum, etc. One might ask how the 99.982% of us will be compensated.

I'd wager many of those connections are serving much more than one person, considering they're often hubs in rural areas. But screw them. It's interesting how if it's anti-elon, it's ok to complain about how the poor are causing the privileged some difficulties.

I would like to see stats how many people got new connections via traditional infrastructure. I bet that number is much higher, probably even an order of magnitude higher.

This is HN, so I should probably look for the data my self...

EDIT:

In 2024 global internet usage grew from 5.3 billion users to 5.5 billion. Starlink grew by only a 1/100 of that in absolute terms, from 2 million users to 4 million over the same time period, majority of users in the USA already had access to the internet via traditional infrastructure.

I tried to find how many StarLink users got internet access (or even high speed internet access) that didn’t have one before, but I couldn’t find the numbers. Somebody could correct me, but I very much doubt that number is high enough to consider StarLink to make even a blimp in providing internet to new users.

EDIT EDIT: I was off by a factor of 100 in initial EDIT, see child post.

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#26

Post by bwestergard »

SoftTalker wrote: post #22
Y-bar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking from a place of ignorance on my part, but does the chemical composition of the satellites versus asteroids/dust have any adverse effects?

The satellites are mostly metal and silicon I would guess, not too different from asteroids.

If someone has the time, I'd love to see the total amount of lead added to the atmosphere by burning up satellites compared to the amount from other anthropogenic sources.

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#28

Post by perihelions »

Y-bar wrote: post #11
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #2

> Soon, McDowell told us, there will be up to 5 satellite reentries per day Starlink’s next-generation V3s, which will require Starship to launch, weigh in around 2 metric tonnes [1]. (They’re currently “around 260 and 310 kilograms” [2].) “Every day, Earth is bombarded with more than 100 tons [91 metric tons] of dust and sand-sized particles” [3]. So we’re talking about a 2 to 10% increase in burn-up by mass. (Not a…

Asking from a place of ignorance on my part, but does the chemical composition of the satellites versus asteroids/dust have any adverse effects?

It's postulated that the high aluminum content of satellites (for perspective, Bennu samples are only 1% Al), as oxidized Al2O3 particles in the stratosphere, catalyze chemistry that destroys ozone. But that's far from a quantitatively meaningful problem, at the current scale.

This source[0] says satellite reentries are about about 12% of the space industry's contribution to ozone depletion (the big one is chlorine from solid rockets), which in turn is 0.1% of the entire anthropogenic contribution; i.e. satellite reentries are ~0.01% of the total.

https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-reentry-pollution-dama...

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#30

Post by bryanlarsen »

leptons wrote: post #24
oceanplexian wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single terminal could serve an entire African village. It's also serving use cases in the Ukraine war, ships at sea, Antarctic research stations, numerous aerospace and military use cases, and so on. DTC is provide texting and emergency services to countless people who might need it in an emergancy, like we saw in North Carolina. Last and most importantly, Starlink exists is to create revenue for SpaceX and to fund…

>The value to humanity of Starship succeeding at its goals is extremely high. This does not benefit "humanity" at all, even if they do succeed. If a human colony on Mars is established, and all of humanity is wiped out on Earth, does it really benefit "humanity" or only the 0.000000001% of "humanity" located on Mars? And life on Mars is going to be difficult, it isn't habitable, and is in fact quite hostile to life.…

The primary benefit of Starship is a sizable reduction of the cost of getting mass to orbit, not Mars dreams.
Post reply on HN