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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • No, it couldn’t. That’s pure misinformation.

    Kessler syndrome is only a possibility in orbits high enough that atmospheric drag is negligible. Starlink, by design, is at an altitude where the atmosphere is still thick enough to bring any debris or old satellites down to earth in a timely fashion rather than building up like Kessler syndrome requires. (To be clear, the air is still so thin that you’d need sensitive instruments to detect it at all. It’s just enough to produce a tiny amount of drag, which adds up over weeks or months to lower the debris’ orbit so that it meets thicker air)

    There are plenty of perfectly legitimate objections you can raise to starlink without resorting to Kessler syndrome




  • They started launching in 2019, according to a quick look at Wikipedia. They told the general public (and regulatory agencies, I think) that the lifetime of the satellites was on the order of 5 years. The plan was to replace them frequently enough to maintain the constellation with that kind of service life (i.e. to launch the whole constellation worth of satellites every 5 years)

    Now, here we are 4 years later. It’s not terribly surprising if some of the early satellites are starting to reach the end of their lives.

    It’s going to be very expensive for them, but not an unexpected cost. This is the reason they’re so keen to start launching them on Starship