SpaceX's Starlink Satellite Program Could Start a Space Junk Disaster
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Re: SpaceX's Starlink Satellite Program Could Start a Space Junk Disaster
#2Anything could, a soyuz rocket exploding would invalidate any launches for the next 5 to 10 years. Boom and shards all over the atmosphere.
Re: SpaceX's Starlink Satellite Program Could Start a Space Junk Disaster
#3Seems 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 you would ever find even one of them?
Then consider that orbital height expands the "surface area" of this satellite spread by an enormous amount....the surface area of a sphere at LEO is substantially larger than the surface area of the earth. I don't know the exact numbers, but I know it's a huge difference.
So the odds of ever finding any would be substantially lower.
I don't think this is something we have to worry about, even if it was 100,000 satellites.
But...I'm not an expert on orbital mechanics. I could be wrong, for sure. Just seems suspect to me.
Re: SpaceX's Starlink Satellite Program Could Start a Space Junk Disaster
#4For a better article, definitely read https://mashable.com/2018/03/06/starlink-spacex-satellites-o...
Re: SpaceX's Starlink Satellite Program Could Start a Space Junk Disaster
#5Seems 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…
I think you're pretty much right, with the proviso that most satellites orbit in roughly the same plane.
Re: SpaceX's Starlink Satellite Program Could Start a Space Junk Disaster
#6Seems 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.
Re: SpaceX's Starlink Satellite Program Could Start a Space Junk Disaster
#7Seems 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…
It's collisions that trigger a runaway Kessler syndrome. Collisions have happened before and they are a serious concern. Just ask the inhabitants of the space station, for example. Probability dictates that sooner or later, something or someone will run into you. I don't think Starlink is doing all that they can to safeguard their satellites, especially considering that managers were fired for not prioritizing quality over speed.
Re: SpaceX's Starlink Satellite Program Could Start a Space Junk Disaster
#8Seems 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…
> 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.
But not evenly. There are certain orbits that most satellites try to stay in.
Re: SpaceX's Starlink Satellite Program Could Start a Space Junk Disaster
#9> 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 feasible to do anything else other than park the satellite in a graveyard orbit or deorbit it.
Re: SpaceX's Starlink Satellite Program Could Start a Space Junk Disaster
#10Seems 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 surface area of a sphere at LEO is substantially larger than the surface area of the earth. I don't know the exact numbers, but I know it's a huge difference.
The surface area of the sphere is not much bigger, LEO starts a few hundred km up compared to the Earth's radius of thousands of km. Maybe 1.5x the surface area. But it expands in 3 dimensions: if the interesting part of LEO is 500km thick and a satellite takes up 10m of it from bottom to top, that's 50,000 concentric Earth-surfaces.