SpaceX's Starlink may be keeping the ozone from healing, research finds

I was going to make a flippant remark asking the lines of “why is it never good news?” but realized it’s a good question and the obvious answer is that everything is in perfect balance after millennia of the planet’s existence. All of this is an aberration from the norm and it’s all going to be bad.

it's almost like any important new technology presents a constellation of tradeoffs

The conditions of the stable equilibrium are different from a change. But that says nothing about which one is better or worse. In some places, climate change would be welcome.

But the whole system is so complicated, it's tough for us to predict all the dynamics. Probably better to not touch it. But I don't think it has to be worse.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL10... is a much better link.

“We consider a generic satellite reentering the mesosphere from LEO. The satellite structure is taken to be entirely aluminum, and the relevant ambient gas is molecular oxygen (COESA, 1976; Plane et al., 2021). In this study, we first carry out an atomic-scale MD simulation—a first-principle informed method for modeling physical and chemical interactions between atomic particles (Rahman, 1964)—to simulate the bond breakage between aluminum atoms (Al-Al bonds) due to the impact of oxygen molecules (O-O bonds) and the formation of aluminum oxides (Al-O bonds) during the ablation stage of reentry.”

Press release circa Jan 2023...based on a 2022 report[1]...apparently leaning into datasets spanning 2000-2020...which, to be fair, buries the following lede (my emphasis):

>> The use of aerosols other than sulfate is expected to change the effects on ozone via changes in heterogeneous chemistry and dynamics and transport. Comprehensive climate model simulations to quantify these effects have yet to be performed. Other aerosol types that absorb less solar radiation would heat the tropical lower stratosphere much less than sulfate. They are also potentially more chemically inert and less impactful on stratospheric ozone. Materials that have been considered include calcium carbonate, titanium dioxide, aluminum oxide, and diamond. The effects on ozone are less certain for these alternate materials owing to the paucity of laboratory and modeling studies investigating them and the lack of natural analogs.

Gotta make you wonder how many Starlink satellites were in orbit back then, and did anyone anticipate the scale that SpaceX would be deploying/decommissioning them looking forward?

[1] https://ozone.unep.org/system/files/documents/Scientific-Ass...