This article has a somewhat alarmist tone, but isn't this just Starlink working as intended?
It seems much better for an old non-functional Starlink satellite to burn up in the atmosphere instead of continuing in an uncontrolled orbit. I believe most burn-ups are controlled intentional deorbits.
benjiro 1 hours ago [-]
Yep, those are the original / older gen sats, that have way less capacity then the newer models. They are moving away from tons of small sats and more to larger (with longer life time) sats that have multiple times the capacity, of the combined smaller sats.
Quoting a older post i made on the subject:
-------
Take in account, that a lot of those are replacement sats for the first generations that they are deorbiting already. Do not quote me on this, but its a insane amount (i though it was around 2k) of the first generation that they are deorbiting. If there is a issue, its not the amount of sats in space, but more the insane amount of deorbiting StarLink is doing.
Starlink wanted to put up insane numbers, but a lot of their fights contain a large percentage of replacement sats.
And they are getting bigger ... v1.5 is like 300kg, the v2.0 mini (ironic as its far from mini compared to its predecessors) are 800kg.
So before StarLink launched 60x v1.5's but now they are doing 21x v2.0 Mini's per launch.
The technology has been improving a lot, allowing for a lot more capacity per satellite. Not sure when they start launching v3's but those have like 3x the capacity for inner connects/ground stations and can go up to 1Gbit speeds (compared to the v2's who are again much more capable then multiple v1.5s).
So what we are seeing is less satellites per launch but more capacity per sat. This year is the last year that they are doing mass 1.5 launches, its all now going to the v2.0 "mini" (so 3x less sats).
Are there not concerns with burning up multiple agglomerations of metal, plastics, and ceramics the size of a small car in the upper atmosphere every day?
CydeWeys 15 minutes ago [-]
The deorbits are controlled to occur over nonpopulated areas (i.e. the middle of the ocean). I don't think it amounts to much of a concern, compared to, say, the sum total emissions of all factories, power plants, ships, airplanes, and vehicles.
fuckyah 53 minutes ago [-]
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JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
> 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 accounting for energy, which natural burn-up has more of, or incomplete burn-up, which reduces the atmospheric effects of artificial mass.)
Broadly speaking, we don’t seem to be in a problematic place in respect of the atmosphere. Where improvement may be required is in moving from splashdown, where we sink space junk in the ocean, to targeted recovery.
I hear 10% increase on a global constant and that doesn't sound like peanuts. If we increase 10% each few years that might be a problem? I don't know anything about whatever field studies this but given that LEO constellations born yesterday even that 2% increase in stuff coming from the skyes sounds significant to me.
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
Short answer is we're still theorizing. Models suggest we might see accumulation. But we might not, or it might not accumulate at relevant altitudes. (Current LEO satellites burn up before hitting the ozone layer.)
shizcakes 1 hours ago [-]
edit: okay I misunderstood what everyone meant
lxgr 40 minutes ago [-]
> please recall that the mass of de-orbiting man-made satellites came from the earth in the first place.
Then again, so are CFCs, CO2, radioactive materials...
Just because some elements naturally occur on Earth doesn't mean we're completely insensitive to where they end up. (That said, I have no idea if atmospheric Aluminium is actually a problem or not.)
VBprogrammer 6 minutes ago [-]
I was watching a video the other day which happened to mention that sodium lasers are used to create artificial stars, used for calibration of adaptive optics in ground based telescopes. This works because one particular layer of the upper atmosphere is rich in sodium due to impact with sodium rich debris.
Obviously it requires a more scientific analysis but it does seem to me that burning a lot of shit on the atmosphere might be problematic.
organsnyder 52 minutes ago [-]
I don't see anyone worrying about planetary mass. I'd be more concerned about atmospheric effects.
palata 42 minutes ago [-]
Is that what you say when you litter? "I don't see a problem with plastic in the ocean, it came from the Earth in the first place".
dylan604 39 minutes ago [-]
Is that really what people are concerned about though?
Y-bar 4 hours ago [-]
Asking from a place of ignorance on my part, but does the chemical composition of the satellites versus asteroids/dust have any adverse effects?
perihelions 4 hours ago [-]
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.
The sheer percentage increase in stratospheric AlO is still alarming.[0]
Satellite reentries in 2022 (ie mostly pre-megaconstellation) were already raising stratospheric AlO levels by 29.5% above normal levels (with satellites adding 'only' 17 t/year), but megaconstellations could raise that to ~480% above natural levels (360 t/year).
This isn't a rounding error, it's a non-trivial change in chemical composition across the entire globe, and effecting a complex and poorly-understood part of the climate system. What could go wrong?
What else can this effect (as usual, discovered belatedly) beyond ozone? Hopefully it's nothing! But I guess we're gonna find out...
> Satellite reentries in 2022 (mostly pre-megaconstellation) were already raising stratospheric AlO levels by 29.5% above normal levels
Those findings are simulated, not observed. Hence "potential."
> it's a non-trivial change in chemical composition over the entire globe, and effecting a complex and poorly-understood part of the climate system. What could go wrong?
Perhaps a lot. Perhaps not much. It's a good question to study. But if this is an issue, it's solvable--carbon composite satellite structures could use a boost in demand and funding.
schiffern 3 hours ago [-]
Interesting. Incidentally SpaceX is probably the most likely to preemptively adopt those measures.
Of all the megaconstellations, SpaceX has historically been the best at being a "good neighbor," with low orbits for debris and lots of engineering to reduce brightness.[0] But hype around SpaceX gives the real bad actors a pass, for example AST is much worse on brightness,[1] and OneWeb and Qianfan are much worse on debris risk.[2]
i still don’t understand why we need huge constellations of satellites at all
HanClinto 25 minutes ago [-]
Because providing infrastructure to remote regions is incredibly difficult through other mechanisms. I don't believe it's hyperbole to say that -- for the goal of improving infrastructure access in some of the most remote and challenging places in the world -- Starlink in particular is one of the most successful pro-humanitarian engineering projects that I can think of in maybe the last 20 years.
Starlink is easily one of my favorite engineering projects. I don't believe anybody has done it cheaper, better, or at wider scale than Starlink has.
Tuna-Fish 1 hours ago [-]
Because it's a way to provide communications from space with acceptable total throughput and latency.
perihelions 3 hours ago [-]
That's still much less than the aluminum from solid rockets, which have been ongoing since the 1970's. Per your own link,
> "In situ measurements showed evidence of a 1,000% increase in stratospheric aluminum levels from 1976 to 1984 (Zolensky et al., 1989), which was associated with the emission of hundreds of tons of such particles from solid rocket motors (SRM) during atmospheric ascent (Brady et al., 1994)"
If you follow Brady et al. (1994)[0], you'll read that every Space Shuttle launch (Table 1) deposited 112 tons of Al2O3 into the stratosphere (>15 km).
This isn't a new phenomenon at all; in fact the peak alumina pollution from in the past (112 tons per STS launch) exceeds the worst-case future estimates from academic research (360 tons per year from satellite reentries).
(/meta Coincidentally, I once linked that exact Brady paper on HN, three years ago[1]. Actually, long before the current social media fad for being concerned about satellites. At the time I wrote, and this has truly aged well, "No one ever gave a shit").
As I understand it, the concern is not just AlO but specifically nanoparticles with high reaction surface area and long lofting lifespans.
The importance of this distinction is acknowledged in Brady et al (1994):
>The exact chemical nature, as well as size distribution (and total surface area) of particles formed in rocket exhaust in the stratosphere is currently unknown. Preliminary experiments at Aerospace by L. R. Martin indicate that plausible particle compositions give highly variable rates of direct ozone destruction.
The 17 t/year and 360 t/year figures are specifically for AlO nanoparticles (formed by hypersonic ablation), whereas Brady et al gives numbers for all AlO particles, regardless of size.
The satellites are mostly metal and silicon I would guess, not too different from asteroids.
bwestergard 4 hours ago [-]
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.
adastra22 4 hours ago [-]
Rough napkin math would be negligible impact. The amount of lead in a satellite is very small, if not actually zero. The amount of lead added by burning coal is about 30 tonnes per day.
everforward 3 hours ago [-]
There is almost definitely a small, negligible amount of lead in the solder in them. Eg NASA requires a small (single digit I think) percentage of lead to prevent tin whiskering.
JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago [-]
> almost definitely a small, negligible amount of lead in the solder in them
Emphasis on negligible. Assuming 0.07 to 0.28 ppm lead [1] in meteoroids, space is dosing us with half to 2 kg a year [2].
> (They’re currently “around 260 and 310 kilograms” [2].)
v1.5 is like 300kg, the v2.0 mini (ironic as its far from mini compared to its predecessors) are 800kg.
The V3's are the one's that need StarShip to deploy. But the current launch platform can take 21x v2.0 Mini's per launch vs the 60x v1.5's they did before.
Taking in account that the v2.0 Mini's are way more capably on a kg/capacity. And the tech keeps getting better. SpaceX does not really need Starship, that is more or less a bonus at this point.
perihelions 52 minutes ago [-]
> "SpaceX does not really need Starship, that is more or less a bonus at this point."
Starship is the moat SpaceX needs to be developing today to stay ahead of where the Chinese competition will be in 5-10 years.
cowpig 2 hours ago [-]
Why is a 2-10% increase a small amount? What increase would be too much?
wat10000 2 hours ago [-]
A 2-10% increase seems like a hell of a lot.
Human CO2 emissions are well under 10% of natural CO2 emissions, and yet that additional amount has been enough to increase the atmospheric concentration of CO2 by over 50% and substantially alter the planetary climate.
CO2 in the atmosphere is at a vastly larger scale than mass falling in from space, so that doesn't mean this is a problem, but that percentage certainly seems to indicate that the question should be studied further.
nicce 4 hours ago [-]
There is a limit how much satellites LEO/GEO can hold unless every satellite has perfect dodging system. Called as Kessler syndrome [1], and one estimate is around 70k satellites. So it is a race who can get the most satellites orbiting, because after a certain point, there is no "space" anymore, and anyone who tries to launch after that point, will be blamed for destroying the satellites of the others. Winner takes all.
That’s one single estimate, and the problem is much more nuanced.
For example, Starlink satellites orbit so low, that even if every single one of them collides and becomes dust, it will all decay and burn up in a matter of months, a couple years at most. The debris cannot physically move to higher orbits to affect other “normal” satellites, though it might impair launches.
Conversely, collisions at much higher geosynchronous orbits can’t possibly create a dense debris field as the total area is immense, deorbit will take millions of years, and everything is usually moving at the same speed (the synchronous part).
SiempreViernes 1 hours ago [-]
The debris that ends up with equal or lower orbital energy than one of the satellites started with doesn't move up, that is true.
But all the bits the bits that end up with more energy than the orbit the satellites were on obviously do move up, and some bits will move up very substantially as we know from Mission Shakti debris: debris from that event at 300 km got apoapsis of up to ~2200 km.
nicce 3 hours ago [-]
> For example, Starlink satellites orbit so low, that even if every single one of them collides and becomes dust, it will all decay and burn up in a matter of months, a couple years at most.
That is way too long. The threshold we are speaking of cannot allow any fragments, because they start chain reaction and destroy more satellites. And there is always one which is on the highest level. What if that gets destroyed?
JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago [-]
> threshold we are speaking of cannot allow any fragments, because they start chain reaction and destroy more satellites
Kessler cascades are localised to specific orbits. In low-earth orbit, they're a problem for a few years.
They're going to be annoying. But not catastrophic.
> there is always one which is on the highest level
Highest level?
nicce 3 hours ago [-]
> Kessler cascades are localised to specific orbits. In low-earth orbit, they're a problem for a few years.
> They're going to be annoying. But not catastrophic.
I think there is a misunderstanding about the whole term. If it is not a big problem, then it does not meet the definition. So there must be some threshold where they aren't problem. What is that threshold? Because certainly there isn't space for infinite amount of objects. Primary question is that whether that threshold matters on practice. If it is 70k, then it is certainly a problem, but who knows the exact number yet.
> Highest level?
There is always the one which is classified orbiting on the highest level in LEO. Also that object can get destroyed; which means it will start deorbiting and with a chance to hit some other object below.
JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago [-]
> What is that threshold?
Way beyond anything we can currently achieve with current and planned launch capacity or radio technology.
> that object can get destroyed; which means it will start deorbiting and with a chance to hit some other object below
Got it, altitude.
Yes, in theory. In practice, the odds of that happening are vanishingly low. If it did happen, the volumes we're talking about are still so big that you'd struggle to come up with a way to cause a third collision even if we remove satellites' abilities to marginally change their orbits.
nicce 2 hours ago [-]
> Way beyond anything we can currently achieve with current and planned launch capacity or radio technology.
How are you so sure, when scientist have been debating this for decades?
> Got it, altitude.
Quibbling isn't an argument.
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
> when scientist have been debating this for decades?
They have been. That's what I'm basing my arguments on.
You've been mentioning a ca. 70,000-bird limit. I think that comes from Bongers & Torres [1]. Their paper runs LEGEND (LEO-to-GEO Environment Debris Model). It does not distinguish between LEO and GEO. That's material because the natural decay period for an object in LEO is on the order of months to years, for LEO, to decades to centuries, for GEO.
Kessler in GEO? Real problem. If you wanted to be a space terrorist, you could probably engineer a cascade today that would make large sections of GEO unusuable for decades if not centuries. The point is that isn't possible for LEO, where you may make a mess in a few orbits for a few years at best.
> Quibbling isn't an argument
Sorry, wasn't quibbling. I genuinely couldn't tell what you meant by "highest level." (I was picturing a food chain, where big clouds of debris "eat" smaller satellites in their way.)
> If it is not a big problem, then it does not meet the definition.
It's still a big problem to wipe out low orbit, but it's not a long lasting one.
> What is that threshold? Because certainly there isn't space for infinite amount of objects.
Even if you crash a billion objects together at 300km, they're all going to go away in a few years. There is no threshold for semi-permanently ruining low orbit.
JumpCrisscross 23 minutes ago [-]
> still a big problem to wipe out low orbit
You're not wiping out LEO, but a particular LEO.
lxgr 58 minutes ago [-]
Why would there be a single numeric threshold?
You can pack many, many satellites into the same orbit without any danger, for example – as long as they move in the same direction. Let's make it 1000 for this thought experiment.
On the other hand, just two moving in opposite directions are obviously going to crash.
So is the number of "safe satellites in all of LEO" 1000 or 1?
bryanlarsen 3 hours ago [-]
No it's not. Kessler simulations show those chain reactions happening over multiple decades.
nicce 3 hours ago [-]
It purely depends of the density of objects. The whole definition of the Kessler syndrome is about the estimation when the density is too much to handle.
I don't know the specifics of starlink satellites but a rupture of any pressurized line has a chance of causing an unintended ascent. Thankfully in most cases the satellite is stabilized, so there is a good chance the satellite just gets a huge amount of rotational velocity added to it with no increase in altitude.
nradov 2 hours ago [-]
You seem to have a misunderstanding of basic orbital mechanics. That wouldn't cause an "ascent" like with an airplane or something. There will be a change in orbital parameters but a permanent change in orbital altitude isn't really possible in that scenario.
Dylan16807 59 minutes ago [-]
Whatever you do to launch an object higher, it will return to its original altitude once per orbit. If you want to stay high you first have to boost up and then you have to boost again half an hour later, which will happen just about never with debris.
lxgr 44 minutes ago [-]
You'd still have an eccentric orbit intersecting some "higher" ones periodically, no?
Certainly less dangerous than something "going the wrong way" in a given orbital shell, but not sure if it's completely negligible either.
observationist 22 minutes ago [-]
It's a mass problem. Instead of imagining the gravity well as something moving away from earth out into the vacuum of space, think of it as a ball that needs to be rolled uphill - even if you give it a huge burst of energy, it's not going to go as far as you think from that one big push, and it's still going to roll back downhill. In order to make it out of the gravity well, you need a lot of focused, continuous energy over huge distances.
There are other factors, too - imagine you're trying to send a penny around the entire equator of the earth, and think of the largest possible explosion you could subject it to without vaporizing it. A stick of dynamite could launch a penny only around a half mile's distance around the equator, assuming ideal conditions, which is about .0025% of the circumference of the earth, which is 10% of the distance between the earth and the moon, and the moon is about 25% of the distance from which earth's gravity stops being a significant factor.
If you carefully deployed a large number of well timed series of dynamite sticks precisely located so that each blew up perfectly beneath the penny at its apex following each previous explosion - you'd need 150-300 sticks to get the penny out past the edge of the effective gravitational well, the point at which other factors in the solar system have the dominant influence - it'd effectively leave earth and start falling toward the sun. At any point closer to earth than that, it will slowly and inexorably return back to earth, reaching up to 25,000 mph before vaporizing itself in the atmosphere (if it fell from the outer edge). If you had no atmosphere, a clear shot, and the "ideal" penny cannon to launch it, you could hypothetically reach escape velocity with only a quarter stick of dynamite.
Incidental bursts of gas, or even outright exploding objects in space are not going to launch a bunch of stuff into much deeper orbit. There's a constant downward pull, and gas and dust creating drag and downward acceleration the closer in you get, and just vast, incomprehensible distances to travel under the influences of gravity. Getting things to go faster than 25,000mph, or reaching escape velocity, without vaporizing the thing you're trying to make go fast, requires as big a continuous explosion as you can make over as long a time period as possible.
I love that AI can whip up an xkcd style "What-If?" type scenario for these questions.
peterfirefly 4 hours ago [-]
Starlink's orbits are so low that everything deorbits automatically. The satellites need to actively work to stay up. That means no Kessler syndrome there.
How many you can fit depends on the available technology. It should eventually be a lot more than 70K just in those low orbits... and still leave plenty of space for rocket launches and returns to thread their way in between them.
nicce 4 hours ago [-]
> Starlink's orbits are so low that everything deorbits automatically.
It is enough if it goes one round around. They can make a cascading effect which can destroy tens of satellites at once, and few fragments are enough. And closer to earth you are, less space there is. They can't all orbit on exactly the same level. There is always one which is on slightly higher level.
JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago [-]
> closer to earth you are, less space there is
Humans are bad at intuiting exponents. There is roughly 200x more volume in LEO than there is between the ground and cruising altitude. Plane changes, moreover, take a lot of energy--you aren't going to get enough energy out of a collision to pollute nearby orbits.
nicce 3 hours ago [-]
> going to get enough energy out of a collision to pollute nearby orbits.
There is no infinite space. The problem is exactly defining the number objects when that "small" amount of energy is actually enough to cause problems.
JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago [-]
> There is no infinite space
Straw man.
> problem is exactly defining the number objects when that "small" amount of energy is actually enough to cause problems
The exercise, maybe. The problem? No. In LEO, which is where Starlink orbits, there is no known solution for causing a Kessler cascade that causes more than a few billion in damage. Space isn't infinite, but it's really big.
Again, a few hundred thousand planes land every day [1]. They operate in a volume less than 1% that of LEO. To approach the object densities where we start controlling an airspace, you'd need tens of millions of objects in LEO alone. We simply do not have--not have any roadmap to having--the sort of launch capacity required to keep 30 million objects in LEO at a time.
There are real problems with more Starlinks in space. Kessler cascades are not one of them.
Sure they can: Leading/trailing each other is quite common. Intersecting orbits are riskier, but also possible without inevitable collisions.
dgs_sgd 4 hours ago [-]
I’m just a layman, but why can’t they increase the orbital radius to solve this problem? Like, if the current “layer” is too full, have the new satellites orbit further out?
JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago [-]
> why can’t they increase the orbital radius to solve this problem?
Because there isn't a problem. LEO contains more than 200x the volume of commercial airspace.
We run out of spectrum and launch capacity well before Kessler cascades become a problem.
4rt 4 hours ago [-]
The reason starlink are so low in the first place is its cheaper to launch to that altitude, you need way less signal strength for devices to connect to them and the round-trip latency is vastly improved. They're intended to be essentially disposable, they're going for shorter lifetime and iterating on hardware improvements faster.
The further out you get, there's less atmospheric drag and each satellite is in view of the ground stations for longer but the cost of launch is higher and latency becomes a big issue. People expect 50ms latency for internet access not 500ms.
tejtm 1 hours ago [-]
Automatic EOL (end of life) deorbiting is a feature not a bug.
I will again note that if Saber Tooth tigers had put things in the orbits we have, it would still be our problem.
parl_match 4 hours ago [-]
very simple explanation but there's a few issues
radio bandwidth: higher frequencies travel a shorter distance and provide more bandwidth. so you get frequency contention and also you need your sats to be physically closer
latency: the further a sat is, the higher the latency. not an issue for text messages. a huge issue for phone calls and general internet tasks. the further you "push" your sat "back", the worst the user experience is
there's other issues too, like geostationary vs geosynchronous and coverage and exposure.
nemomarx 4 hours ago [-]
Low orbit is how star link is able to achieve their connections, isn't it? I think of they moved to normal telecom orbit the performance would be like normal satellite internet too
peterfirefly 4 hours ago [-]
They originally planned to be about 1100km up. They are currently about 550km up. Plenty of possible layers in between...
Another 500 km won't affect latency much. It'll be around 3 more ms per round trip.
nemomarx 3 hours ago [-]
That's not a bad latency addition, you're right. Good note
michaelmior 4 hours ago [-]
Not with a geostationary orbit. That must have a fixed radius. The problem is that satellites have to move to counteract the force of gravity to avoid falling out of orbit. But if they move too much or too little, then the satellite moves with respect to the earth and the orbit is no longer geostationary.
(Caveat: Not an expert by any means, just someone who had a similar question and did some reading, so my answer may well be incomplete or not fully correct.)
zwily 2 hours ago [-]
Starlink satellites aren't geostationary.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 4 hours ago [-]
WP says Low Earth Orbit is popular because it's cheap to get stuff there, the latency is low (speed of light starts to matter when you're a couple Earth diameters up) and bandwidth to the ground is high (I assume it's harder to send a signal a longer distance, even through vacuum)
A land grab. That might explain the desire to put anything in space, even something useless like mirrors to reflect sunlight
superkuh 4 hours ago [-]
Short lifetime and quick re-entry is a great feature of vLEO constellations. No long term space junk. Compare that to MEO or GEO where sats are there pretty much forever (hundreds to thousands of years). Or even high LEO with many tens of years.
whazor 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, it is much better to error on the side of losing satellites, versus making future space travel impossible.
JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago [-]
> versus making future space travel impossible
Not a real thing. (It was proposed as a possibility. We searched the parameter space. Mostly in the context of militaries trying to figure out how to deny orbits to an adversary. It's really difficult, to the point that even if one were intentionally trying to cause Kessler cascades, they wouldn't deny an adversary access to orbit.)
MikeNotThePope 2 hours ago [-]
Although it could become risky enough that the cost mitigation becomes untenable. For example, I wouldn't want to live in a neighborhood so dangerous that I have to pay to cover my house in thick armor plating just to avoid being collateral damage of the violence shenanigans outside my front door.
tshaddox 6 minutes ago [-]
I’m not sure you’re describing a different scenario, since I don’t think anyone was ever only concerned about a future where there’s a 100% chance of a launch being prevented by debris.
JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago [-]
> it could become risky enough that the cost mitigation becomes untenable
What cost mitigation are you referring to?
> thick armor plating
It makes about as much sense to armor a satellite as it does a plane. (Much less, actually, given the fuel costs are higher, energies in orbit are higher and densities orders of magnitude lower--to approximate the global density of airplanes in LEO, we'd need something like 4mm satellites up there. To approximate the density of controlled airspaces in LEO, we need about 10x that.)
> violence shenanigans outside my front door
Where the closest object to your front door is 10+ miles away.
dostick 2 hours ago [-]
That means there must be launching to orbit equivalent replacement, not daily of course.
darknavi 2 hours ago [-]
Indeed, SpaceX often has multiple launches of Starlink sats a week.
A launch every 3 days all throughout 2025. Simply incredible.
Zufriedenheit 2 hours ago [-]
Can this become dangerous for airplanes? Or are they fully burned up before reaching that low altitude?
naberhausj 2 hours ago [-]
This article [1] indicates that they burn up at altitudes between 37-50 miles above the surface. If so, that's well above the 40,000' that planes normally fly.
> NOAA said the stratosphere contains an unexpected quantity of particles with a variety of exotic metals. The scientists believe the particles come from satellites and spent rocket boosters as they are vaporized by the intense heat of reentry.
My start-up is called Strato Mines - collecting rare earths from 120km above earth. Willing to give 1% at a 100B valuation to any qualified investor.
Fischgericht 3 hours ago [-]
[Disclaimer: Not a hater, just a Nerd looking at data.]
And just as Tesla's stock goes up whenever there are reports about them no longer selling cars, or being years behind on self-driving tech and robotics... if Starlink would be publicly traded, their stock would now shoot way up.
On a more serious note: If analysts would do their job, they could have found out years ago that Starlink will never ever be profitable, just as no Sat ISP in history ever has been. All always have and are funded with tax-payer money.
Why is that? Simple maths.
Including R&D and launch cost and expected usage time, the TCO of one of their satellites will be somewhere in the area of $2,000,000. One of them in theory has a peak speed of 100 GBit/s. If you overbook the link by a factor of 10 as it is common for an ISP, that gives you 1,000 Gbit/s to sell.
So in best case over the lifetime of the system you will make a revenue of 1,000 * $100 * 36 months. So you end up somewhere in the area of $3,600,000. Yes, that is more than $2,000,000, but well, there are a couple of billions of investments and investor money here to be paid back one day.
"But why are you only assuming a usage time of 3 years?"
While Musk's idea of rapid R&D cycles is fine for Software, it's extremely expensive. The "Oops, the Sat-to-Sat links are not working, so we now have to build base stations everywhere and can not do load distribution" might have cost Starlink something like $10 BILLION? I guess I would have tested my stuff first before launching it. With now two generations of Starlink sats already being outdated and/or falling from the sky, the "in two weeks" promises from Musk don't make me very confident that Starlink v3 will actually be properly tested prior to polluting space with their buggy trash again.
But let's restart it in a much simpler way: A currently used commercial fiber cable can do 800 GBit/s, so eight times of a Starlink Satellite. Real-life data has already proven that the lifespan (outdated transceivers etc) is somewhere around 5-8 years, with the biggest risk being your cable getting cut. The cable itself costs virtually nothing. Due to this "developing" countries have mostly decided to not lay fiber underground. In Thailand for example, the fiber cables are simply thrown onto houses and through the jungle, as replacing them is dirt cheap. Anyway: If you map this to the TCO on 3 years as mapped above, this means compared to the TCO of $2,000,000 for Starlink, for fiber you are looking at something in the area of $10,000 instead. It's a no-brainer.
Real-life proof: I live on a tiny and very very remote Island in Asia. Some people used to have Starlink here. But due to their Satellites now being massively overbooked, speeds went down months to months. So people noticed that it is actually cheaper to run 10 KILOMETERS / 6 Miles of Fiber cable through the jungle. And on this tiny remote Island there are three Fiber ISPs to choose from. Two of them offer 1 GBit/s for $13 per month, and if you want a business service, for $40 you can get 2 GBit/s down / 1 GBit/s up. And unlike Starlink those ISPs are profitable.
You have to be EXTREMELY remote for Sat internet to make sense. No, not rural USA. Fiber will be cheaper. No, not Africa. Fiber through the desert will be cheaper. Sat Internet may make sense if you live in the artic or on mount Everest or something like that. Or Mars. In all other cases the TCO of Fiber will win.
JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago [-]
> "But why are you only assuming a usage time of 3 years?"
Your entire analysis rests on this point, which you fail to demonstrate. (You also cite zero sources, which isn't encouraging.)
(EDIT: This assumption is conservative, but reasonable.)
Was this AI generated?
> The cable itself costs virtually nothing
Did you attempt to look up the cost of laying new fibre trunk?
> due to their Satellites now being massively overbooked, speeds went down months to months
Then this isn't a remote location. Starlink's economics have been pretty obvious for anyone who has been on a plane, boat or train in the last decade. They're also terrifically useful for remote mining, observation and military operations.
> people noticed that it is actually cheaper to run 10 KILOMETERS / 6 Miles of Fiber cable through the jungle
Well sure, if you ignore negative exernalities a lot of stuff is cheap.
Fischgericht 1 hours ago [-]
Wow. Well, I believe that YOU are a bot, not me. Are you Grok?
Anyway, yes, I am a human.
And it is not that hard to find the sources for this point:
v1 constellation was completed in 2021, and decommissioned from 2024.
v2 deployed from 2023, but the sat-to-sat communication is not working, so all of them, will need to be replaced by v3, too.
wmf 6 minutes ago [-]
The sat-to-sat laser links are used to provide connectivity on the open ocean and in remote parts of Australia and Argentina that are beyond the range of any ground station. They're definitely working but AFAIK they are only used when necessary so if you're within range of a ground station your traffic will never use laser links.
Fischgericht 42 seconds ago [-]
Oops, forgot one important thing: Sure, why do additional hops if you can see the base station. But what about shared state? Why do you definitely still get a completely new session when moving to the next sat? If the laser links are working, that state should be shared between neighboring sats.
Fischgericht 3 minutes ago [-]
I will not disagree as I can not verify this claim. Have you tested it yourself or have a source which has some tech proof on that one?
JumpCrisscross 56 minutes ago [-]
> I believe that YOU are a bot
I don't believe you were a bot, but there were one or two phrasings that gave me pause. (If I believed you had written that with AI, I'd have just asked that and not bothered engaging.)
> v1 constellation was completed in 2021, and decommissioned from 2024. v2 deployed from 2023, but the sat-to-sat communication is not working, so all of them, will need to be replaced by v3, too
Fair enough. $3.6mm on $2mm--assuming $100,000 per month revenue and $2mm paid up front, which is unrealistically conservative--yields a 22% annualised. Take that out to the increasingly-attained design life of 5 years and it jumps to 25%. To put it bluntly, these are both incredibly high telecom returns.
You've already incorporated launch, maintenance, disposal, et cetera in TCO. So the remainder is customer service (usually 5 to 10% of revenue) and cost of capital. Even assuming 10% WACC, which is on the upper end for a leveraged telecom play, we're still comfortably generating excess return.
Where the comparison fall apart is in respect of fibre. Laying physical infrastructure is hard. You have long periods between capital outlay and return. Also, you have to right scale up front--you can't just launch more birds in a few months as demand scales (or hold them back if it doesn't).
You're not going to replace fibre with Starlink. But the economic case for the latter doesn't fall apart with 20%+ operating returns.
Fischgericht 40 minutes ago [-]
Well, on purpose I have given Starlink very optimistic numbers, yes. :)
And yes, 22% yield sounds nice, but if someone would hand me their pitch deck and give me a SWAT analysis I would just laugh them away: The risks are far too high.
(See for example the article that this very thread is about.)
Of course you can only guess based on that, but it looks that in real life things are worse:
These data points might be interpreted as "Starlink is getting 40% of their revenue from tax money".
And while "7 million subscribers" might sound impressive on first sight: This is the number of DSL connections subscribed to in the tiny country of Belgium. But for magical reasons Starlink is valuated at a price higher than if you would buy all of Belgium ;)
Your point in regards of laying physical infrastructure is valid for a lot of western countries. But not all of them. Some countries in the EU for example years ago created laws that say that whoever opens the street for any reasons has to put in empty tubes for someone to later put in fiber before closing the street again.
So: This is a regulatory subject really, not physical cost. Fiber is dirt cheap if you are allowed to use existing power poles for example (which is unlike with copper obviously not a problem in regards of signal integrity), or existing underground pipes, or just throw it from house roof to house roof.
JumpCrisscross 29 minutes ago [-]
> I have given Starlink very optimistic numbers
Your revenue figures are consumer only. And while you're generous on utilization factor, we capitalised the TCO up front while amortising revenue, and then reduced asset tenure to worst case observed during development.
Flex up to 4 years, let $1mm TCO be paid up front and the rest amortised, and reduce utilisation to 80% ($80k/month revenue) and IRR shoots up to 73%. Take TCO to $3mm ($1mm up front, $2mm amortised), reduce utilisation to 75% and we're still over 20%.
> while "7 million subscribers" might sound impressive on first sight: This is the number of DSL connections subscribed to in the tiny country of Belgium. But for magical reasons Starlink is valuated at a price higher than if you would buy all of Belgium
Well, yes. Starlink connections are more profitable and you can't scale selling internet to Belgium into a Starshield defence contract. Or selling to airlines and cruise ships and yachts and mining operations, all of which pay more than a Belgian.
> some countries in the EU for example years ago created laws that say that whoever opens the street for any reasons has to put in empty tubes for someone to later put in fiber before closing the street again
Starlink doesn't sense in densely-populated areas of the EU or Asia. (And the equivalent for SpaceX would be ridesharing Starlink on someone else's flight.)
> Fiber is dirt cheap if you are allowed to use existing power poles for example
If you have the scale. You're underestimating the risk that comes from having to place infrastructure up front.
Your analysis is pretty solid. But I don't think it's taking into account the fact that you can build multibillion-dollar telecoms business on a few tens of millions of high-paying customers.
Fischgericht 16 minutes ago [-]
I guess we can agree that the comparison between Sat internet and physical links depends a lot on the physical situation in the target region, and the regulatory frame work.
And please keep in mind that while you are right that there is a risk investing into physical infrastructure also applies to Starlink. It's worth remembering here that all Sat Internet companies prior to Starlink had failed and needed to be rescued with tax payer money.
I don't have exact numbers, and it's a bit muddy due to state subsidiaries, but in Germany the average cost to connect a subscriber in a medium density town with fiber, with given that nothing was prepared and you have to open the street etc appears to be in region of €/$ 2,000 or so.
I don't know if that is done in the US, but also in Europe we now do "trenching". It has some downsides and pitfalls, but this reduces the upfront infrastructure cost for fiber massively.
JumpCrisscross 14 minutes ago [-]
> while you are right that there is a risk investing into physical infrastructure also applies to Starlink
Absolutely. It's why I think assuming the WACC of a highly-leveraged telecom (around 10%) is appropriate.
> this reduces the upfront infrastructure cost for fiber massively
Fibre makes sense where there is density. It's higher capacity and cheaper. That doesn't mean it makes sense everywhere. And a lot of that everywhere will pay a lot of money for connectivity.
The global telecom market generates trillions of dollars of annual revenue [1]. There is a lot of fruit for the picking.
Why do you believe the inter-satellite links are not working?
Fischgericht 1 hours ago [-]
[Due to the part of the spectrum I am on, I do not have believes or opinions.]
The laser based inter-links still not working has been subject on various conferences like AngaCOM etc.
But in my case: I have simply tried it *). And every Starlink user can do it, too: Use traceroute. And if you think "they might be hiding the hop-to-hops between Sats!", you can dig deeper using MTR behind the modem or simply rooting the modem itself.
Last time I have connected to a v3 Sat however was ~6 months ago. Maybe an active user reading this can try today?
niwtsol 38 minutes ago [-]
Do you have a link to a blog or writeup regarding the inter-links not working? Hard to find it without getting lost in "Troubleshoot your starlink device" SEO hell.
JumpCrisscross 16 minutes ago [-]
> Do you have a link to a blog or writeup regarding the inter-links not working?
The simpler answer is intra-constellation communication is a bleeding-edge technology. It's an extraordinary challenge for which extraordinary proof is needed to show success, not the other way around. SpaceX has solved most of the gating technical problems. But getting it to work reliably enough that it becomes more economic than ground-based backhaul will take time.
1 hours ago [-]
Fischgericht 56 minutes ago [-]
Here is an example thread of someone having done the measurements of v3 vs mini:
A simple way to verify that their inter-sat links are not working and/or are not used is to simply sit and wait: If you are switched from one Sat to the next, you get new "session" and previous NAT state is lost. If this would be a meshed backbone, that would not happen.
stronglikedan 2 hours ago [-]
> Was this AI generated?
It's crazy to me that people use AI to generate comments for social sites of all things, but here we are.
Fischgericht 52 minutes ago [-]
I find it even more crazy that you no longer can comment on HN without someone trying to invalidate valid points by claiming you not being human. :)
To be honest, while I took it lightly, others might feel pretty insulted by such claims. De-humanizing someone stinks.
ahmeneeroe-v2 60 minutes ago [-]
>are funded with tax-payer money
This has nothing to do with profitability. DoD/War Dept contracts are "tax payer money" and shareholders are happy to have those.
>it is actually cheaper to run 10 KILOMETERS / 6 Miles of Fiber cable through the jungle
Cheaper, sure. But try getting this approved in the US through a County Planning Commission. And you did get NEPA/CEQA done too right?
>No, not rural USA. Fiber will be cheaper.
My not-that-rural town has fiber only 80% of town. Houses with city sewer/water don't have fiber
Fischgericht 9 minutes ago [-]
All of this is regulatory stuff. Your state has the option of making it expensive and a PITA or not.
In my ex home town in Germany we had the exact same thing as you are describing - Fiber available everywhere up to 20 meters away from our house, and no chance to get it connected. For purely regulatory reasons.
lxgr 30 minutes ago [-]
> The "Oops, the Sat-to-Sat links are not working, so we now have to build base stations everywhere and can not do load distribution" might have cost Starlink something like $10 BILLION? I guess I would have tested my stuff first before launching it. With now two generations of Starlink sats already being outdated and/or falling from the sky
You don't seem to understand their strategy: Constant replacement is a feature, not a bug, to them.
And in that paradigm, why wait any longer than absolutely necessary with any given launch? The problem is already fixed – at least inter-satellite links seem to be working well enough now (as evidenced by global coverage on the oceans).
> Starlink will never ever be profitable, just as no Sat ISP in history ever has been.
How do you explain the non-zero stock price of e.g. Iridium and Viasat?
> You have to be EXTREMELY remote for Sat internet to make sense. No, not rural USA. Fiber will be cheaper.
Are you sure laying fiber to every last home is really more capital efficient in the long term? Have you done the math on that side too?
And what about mobile coverage? Even solar-powered low maintenance cell stations need to be installed, repaired after storms, have their solar cells dusted off etc.
> No, not Africa. Fiber through the desert will be cheaper. Sat Internet may make sense if you live in the artic or on mount Everest or something like that.
Mount Everest has pretty good cell signal, as far as I know. It's a tiny area, compared to actually remote but still (sparsely) populated regions.
Fischgericht 5 minutes ago [-]
Due to the nature of the business I am in I very well know Viasats customer base. They are too important to fail for multiple european military organizations.
As discussed elsewhere in this thread, the intra-links still do not seem to be enabled. Can not verify myself due not having a yacht and/or time, but I am constantly flying between Asia and Europe with various airlines, and so far none of them have switched to Starlink but keep paying the outrageous pricing from ViaSat & co.
TheAlchemist 2 hours ago [-]
That's also my opinion - it will probably never be profitable - it's a great product, but the economics are not right - and that's why no other provider did this (even though they have the tech).
Let's see what happens once the bubble pops.
JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago [-]
> once the bubble pops
What's the bubble? It's cash-flow positive. All of SpaceX is cash-flow positive--they've been buying back their own shares.
You can argue it's overrated, i.e. customers will drop it after trying it for a while. (Or when a recession forces their hand.) But bubble requires leverage and losses, neither of which SpaceX (or Starlink) have.
TheAlchemist 2 hours ago [-]
Sorry, I was referring to the general stock market (mostly AI) bubble.
As for SpaceX, it's pretty much impossible to know their finances - they don't publish audited accounts. We can just trust what Elon is willing to share with us.
lxgr 20 minutes ago [-]
What does a stock market bubble have to do with the profitability (i.e. not the valuation) of any given company?
Are you arguing that the demand in Internet connectivity in rural/remote areas is somehow caused by an investment bubble as opposed to a long-term stable need?
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
> for SpaceX, it's pretty much impossible to know their finances - they don't publish audited accounts
SpaceX has audited financials. They're not published, but they leak a lot.
TheAlchemist 50 minutes ago [-]
Yes, and Elon companies are well known for leaking reliable information.
JumpCrisscross 39 minutes ago [-]
> Elon companies are well known for leaking reliable information
SpaceX isn't leaking their own financials.
wmf 2 hours ago [-]
Analysts that I've seen estimate that Starlink is already profitable and will remain so. Unless you can explain the differences between your math and their math, this is yet another Elon-hating conspiracy theory.
Fischgericht 1 hours ago [-]
Gimme your source URL, please.
As others have pointed out already in this thread: No serious analyst and not even Starlink themselves have claimed to be profitable. They have claimed to be operationally profitable. This means that the cost of operating the sats is lower than the revenue they make. It does leave out all other cost. Yes, if they could build and launch the Sats for free instead of ~$2 million per piece, that could be a profitable business.
Also, have you actually used Starlink? It's crap. Yes, in 2023 when they did not have customers you got decent speeds. Now it's completely overbooked. Yes, you can make a year of profits milking existing customers.
Google "Starlink benchmark" or "Starlink feedback" etc and you will see things like these:
At this point Starlink's active customer base is rating their service to be worse than... cancer, I guess?
JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago [-]
> this is yet another Elon-hating conspiracy theory
Nothing in their analysis is conspiratorial. It's flawed. But not alleging conspiracy.
throwzasdf 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
josefritzishere 4 hours ago [-]
I am not convinced that Starlink will continue to exist long term. They reported break even in 2023 but I don't think that included the ongoing cost of replacing satillites.
bryanlarsen 4 hours ago [-]
They reported cash flow positive. "Cash flow positive" is a much stronger statement than "profitable" because it doesn't let you play games with amortization. So it included the ongoing cost of replacing satellites plus 100% costs of putting up new ones for future use where normal accounting would allow you to amortize those costs.
SpaceX is obviously quite profitable. They're obviously spending many billions annually on salaries, Starlink launches and Starship development yet they haven't raised significant money via debt or equity financing rounds in the last few years.
mothballed 4 hours ago [-]
Starlink is operated by Starlink Services, LLC which allows SpaceX to play all sorts of accounting tricks by mixing in engineered contracts with SpaceX.
bryanlarsen 3 hours ago [-]
Independent estimates are for $5B of profit on $10B of revenue for Starlink for 2025.
You don't get numbers like that by subsidizing it from the ~$1B/year launch business.
That's how SpaceX justifies its launch capabilities. Their strategy of using assembly line techniques to build reusable rockets make no sense unless there is a lot of stuff to launch. Satellites are crazy expensive, and the launch represents only a smaller part of the total budget, so even if the launch was free, there is only so much demand.
Starlink is more than half of SpaceX launches, building their own demand.
And replacing satellites regularly was the plan. I don't know how they did their report, but they certainly budgeted it internally. SpaceX is a private company, they tell you what they want to tell you.
adastra22 4 hours ago [-]
Their accounting does include that cost.
josefritzishere 2 hours ago [-]
Starlink is not publicly traded. That lowers the bar on transparency so we're all relying on estimates and press releases which are mostly marketing vehicles. Absent rela quarterly financial reports I think most of this is still in the realm of opinion.
micromacrofoot 4 hours ago [-]
It sure would be nice if we found out if this mattered before it does.
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.
xnx 4 hours ago [-]
Could we say the same about flights to Hawaii? Small number of people take lavish vacations, everyone else gets the pollution.
It's good to look at the costs vs. benefits of everything, but satellite networks are way far down on my list of concern (and I do some astrophotography).
ggoo 4 hours ago [-]
After just coming back from a trip to Maui, yeah you can totally say the same about flights to Hawaii.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 4 hours ago [-]
We should. A global pollution tax would shake out a lot of problems.
A strong and trustworthy global democracy to enforce it, and to provide for the general welfare of everyone currently trapped in car-based cities... Is left as a simple exercise to the reader
JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago [-]
> A global pollution tax would shake out a lot of problems
There is a reason these taxes are popular among rich countries and opposed by emerging ones.
loeg 4 hours ago [-]
Personally, I've never suffered from satellite plasma or light pollution from satellites, or spectrum allocation. I suspect most of the 100% are like me.
ggoo 4 hours ago [-]
Scientific advancement has suffered from the light pollution and that advancement is a driving force behind your modern life. So you have (or will) suffer indirectly over time.
JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago [-]
> Scientific advancement has suffered from the light pollution
Has it?
Destroying the Amazon destroys information. Light pollution simply raises the cost of our accessing it. I suppose one could model this out to some effect on deep-space astronomy's productivity. But if that effect is real--and I've seen zero evidence it is--the solution is a tax on satellite launches to fund more observatories.
ggoo 2 hours ago [-]
Your response is not in good faith - this is very easy to google.
JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago [-]
> this is very easy to google
Then it should be easy to cite. Astronomers have complained. But I haven't seen anyone link that to output, including the complaining astronomers.
runarberg 1 hours ago [-]
Search term: "low earth orbit satellite effects on astronomy" first result:
OP said "scientific advancement has suffered from the light pollution," past tense. Your source explores a "potentially large rise in global sky brightness," and an "expected...rapid rise in night sky brightness."
These are not risks to be ignored. But we haven't even observed or quantified them, which is the first step to weighing mitigation options. (Which could be physical, e.g. lowering satellite reflectivity. Or geographic, putting more observatories are higher latitudes. Or even statistical, by launching space-based calibration telescopes, or building more array-based observatories.)
loeg 4 hours ago [-]
I think your attempted connection between astronomy and modern technological conveniences is pretty thin.
ggoo 2 hours ago [-]
Does your phone have a camera on it?
hobs 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
IAmBroom 3 hours ago [-]
Unless you don't breathe air, you can't make the first statement with absolute certainty.
"Workin' in these coal mines ain't hurt me none no-how."
oceanplexian 4 hours ago [-]
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 Starship program. The value to humanity of Starship succeeding at its goals is extremely high.
xnx 4 hours ago [-]
> The value to humanity of Starship succeeding at its goals is extremely high.
Starship to orbit sounds useful, but Starship to Mars is near useless. If that's what rich people want to spend their money on, go nuts.
Ancapistani 3 hours ago [-]
> Starship to orbit sounds useful, but Starship to Mars is near useless.
I strongly disagree.
If "Starship to Mars" is a possibility, then so is "Starship to the asteroid belt". It's very close to "Starship to the asteroid belt, capture asteroid, return to Earth orbit" - and that's very close to orbital mining of metals that are rare and valuable on Earth.
JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago [-]
> It's very close to "Starship to the asteroid belt, capture asteroid, return to Earth orbit"
To put this into perspective, an Earth-Mars round trip costs about 15 km/s; Earth-main Belt about 13 km/s.
You'd need to add Δv for returning the mass of the asteroid. But you get your reaction mass for "free."
(To be clear, we are hundreds of billions of dollars of capex and decades away from asteroid mining. But the work to get there is decently in line with the work we would need to establish a logistical chain to Mars and back.)
JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago [-]
> Starship to Mars is near useless
Apollo to the Moon was near useless by that metric. We wouldn't have Starship to orbit if we hadn't gone to the moon.
thrance 4 hours ago [-]
You're discounting the fact that building Starship, if successful, has a non-zero chance of taking Musk away from Earth forever. That's a huge potential positive.
tgv 4 hours ago [-]
> The value to humanity of Starship succeeding at its goals is extremely high.
I beg to disagree. I see no value at all. This must be one of those accelerationist or extropianist/utilitarian beliefs.
londons_explore 3 hours ago [-]
> The value to humanity of Starship succeeding at its goals is extremely high.
If humanity agreed with this statement, humanity would fund the program directly through investment, donations or taxes, the same way we fund roads and schools which we also value highly.
JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago [-]
> If humanity agreed with this statement, humanity would fund the program directly through investment, donations or taxes, the same way we fund roads and schools which we also value highly
...Starlink and SpaceX are funded through investments and taxes. When they launch a non-profit's satellite I guess, indirectly, through donations, too.
Also, what? Why is the funding source a measure of value?
leptons 4 hours ago [-]
>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.
bryanlarsen 4 hours ago [-]
The primary benefit of Starship is a sizable reduction of the cost of getting mass to orbit, not Mars dreams.
leptons 3 hours ago [-]
That's a bit of a re-branding.
How does "getting mass to orbit" benefit all of humanity more than what we have now? Not that much, I think, but maybe you have some inside scoop that the rest of us don't know about.
JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago [-]
> That's a bit of a re-branding
No, it isn't. Starlink's entire commercial value is in being able to perform high-mass / low-latency launch to LEO. There is some fun stuff on the Moon. And a long-term pitch on Mars. But the commercial branding has always been about LEO.
> How does "getting mass to orbit" benefit all of humanity more than what we have now?
Better Earth observation. Better space observation. Communications outside our ecology versus based on wires strung through it.
Let's reverse the question. For the environmental impact of space launch, what else do we do that's more-agreeably useless?
leptons 59 minutes ago [-]
Bullshit. Every story I've ever heard about "Starship" is how it is going to Mars to take humans there to build a colony. I've never once heard that "Starship" will be used to launch even more starlink satellites. They even made movies about it:
>"Yes, SpaceX's Starship is being developed with the explicit goal of transporting humans and cargo to Mars, with Elon Musk aiming for the first uncrewed test missions to send robotic Tesla bots by 2026 and crewed missions potentially beginning around 2029 or 2031. The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and is the world's most powerful launch vehicle, intended to eventually establish a self-sustaining city on the planet."
It's pretty wasteful to blow up starship after starship after starship when they could have spent that money launching normal rockets for their satellite deployments.
Of course spacex probably wants to rebrand starship now that Mars is looking like the very stupid plan that it was.
There are better things humanity could be doing with the time and money spent blowing up "starship" after "starship". And really, why name it "starship" if it's just meant for LEO? Because it wasn't intended for LEO, that's why. It's a rebrand. Just call it "LEOship" if it's just going to be launching satellites.
It's yet one more case of Musk over-promising and under-delivering.
JumpCrisscross 24 minutes ago [-]
> Every story I've ever heard about "Starship" is how it is going to Mars to take humans there to build a colony
Could this reflect your media diet?
> never once heard that "Starship" will be used to launch even more starlink satellites
That's kind of wild. I understand getting the PR stuff first, but every newspaper I read mentions Starlink whenever SpaceX comes up, unless it's about a launch explosion or Artemis.
> pretty wasteful to blow up starship after starship after starship when they could have spent that money launching normal rockets for their satellite deployments
V3 doesn't fit on smaller rockets. And Starship's launch costs promise to be much lower than the Falcons.
> why name it "starship" if it's just meant for LEO? Because it wasn't intended for LEO, that's why
Starship isn't an interstellar platform...
chermi 4 hours ago [-]
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.
dweinus 3 hours ago [-]
If we wanted to subsidize internet for rural and low-income communities responsibly, we could invest in fiber and other solutions, and control the externalities (this is exactly the ReConnect program is). Starlink is not that, it is a classic case of privatizing profits by socializing hidden externalities, in this case to the entire world. Externalities in the form of pollution that will cost us all more than fiber in the long run. Funny story though, Starlink was awarded a $900M subsidy to provide rural USA internet access. In the end, that money was not given because the FCC found that Starlink "failed to demonstrate that the providers could deliver the promised service.". So no, it is not about screwing rural people, it's about not getting taken advantage of by fat cats and grifters like Elon.
JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago [-]
> If we wanted to subsidize internet for rural and low-income communities responsibly, we could invest in fiber and other solutions, and control the externalities
Running cables across out land is less impactful than lofting satellites?
chermi 1 hours ago [-]
The last mile problem is difficult and expensive. I think satellites are a good solution to it. As for SpaceX fucking up that contract, that sucks and is no good.
runarberg 4 hours ago [-]
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.
londons_explore 3 hours ago [-]
> In 2024 global internet usage grew from 5.3 billion users to 5.5 Starlink grew by a similar absolute amount, from 2 million users to 4 million over the same time period,
Is this some AI answer or did you foobar this math by a factor of 100?
runarberg 3 hours ago [-]
Whoops, a standard off by a factor of 100 error.
StarLink got 2 million new subscribers in 2024. Meanwhile the internet got 200 million new users. So even if every new StarLink subscriber would be a new internet user (which is obviously not true) they would still only account for 1% of new internet users. The real number is off course much much much lower.
chermi 1 hours ago [-]
This is definitely a small number. But I don't think it tells the whole story. Not every n+1 is the same. New satellite hookups in rural places, especially poor rural areas, combat zones, emergency situations etc. are more impactful than a new wired hookup in a city where there's already wifi in the library, for example.
runarberg 54 minutes ago [-]
You made the statement:
> It's interesting how if it's anti-elon, it's ok to complain about how the poor are causing the privileged some difficulties.
Now it is up to you to show that this has outsized influence on impoverished communities.
According to ITU[1] the number one factor for lack of internet access is economical. The price of internet access can be reduced with traditional infrastructure, but governments are often unable or unwilling to invest in the infrastructure needed to bring faster and cheaper internet connectivity to underserved areas. StarLink should in theory fit perfectly here, but in reality very few people from underserved communities, especially in impoverished areas, can afford StarLink, and keep being underserved. What makes this even worse is that in the rich countries (like the USA and Australia) underserved communities that had been promised infrastructure to bring the broadband internet are facing delays and cancellations because politicians believe the community can get StarLink instead (when in fact they cannot afford it). This is known as the Uber effect (from when politicians used Uber as an excuse to cancel public transit projects).
Also worth considering is the Uber effect of public infrastructure. Meaning that politicians may use the existence of StarLink as an excuse to delay or cancel public projects which would otherwise have delivered broadband internet to under-served areas via traditional infrastructure.
This is similar to how the existence of Uber has caused delays or cancellation of public transit projects because politicians were able to say the people were better served with Uber than public transit.
4 hours ago [-]
j45 4 hours ago [-]
It's less about percentage.
Economic opportunity is largely shifting towards not only having internet access, but performant internet access.
Costs will come down. There will be alternatives.
But they might have taken much longer to come to market without something like this.
I'm not a fanboy, but there's obviously a lot of people who have worked hard to make Starlink a reality.
runarberg 3 hours ago [-]
Traditional infrastructure is a proven method of bringing both the availability to uderserved areas, as well as bringing the costs down for those already served.
StarLink provides a great oportunity for politicians to delay or cancel projects which would otherwise have given broadband connection to underserved areas. In urban planning this is known as the Uber effect.
chermi 44 minutes ago [-]
Take this argument to it's conclusion. Take any point in history and freeze infrastructure. The only option we give ourselves is building more of that same type and maintaining it? So, more riders and more horses to carry messages, but no telegraph? Or maybe more accurately, keeping the medium the same, never using planes or trucks to deliver mail?
runarberg 26 minutes ago [-]
I don‘t follow how that is the conclusion, nor do I understand your analogy.
Broadband internet via cables, fiber optics, and radio towers is state of the art in telecommunication infrastructure. Satellite is both slower, more limited, and more prone to various disruptions. The capabilities of the wires and the radio towers is also improving. 5 years ago we didn’t have 5G towers, and 20 years ago fiber optics seemed a distant dream. The only thing freezing traditional telecommunication infrastructure in place are dreams of low earth orbit satellites which will never materialize.
If I understand your analogy correctly (which I‘m not sure I do) this is like looking at the new technology of pneumatic tubes and stipulating that all postal delivery will be done using this new technology in the future, and we may as well stop funding the national postal service, remove mail-rooms from our ships and trains, because somebody will build a pneumatic tube that will deliver mail door to door between New York and Chicago.
Fairburn 3 hours ago [-]
No, not because of Elon. But I can see how you think so.
thrance 4 hours ago [-]
Musk and his right-wing propaganda platform plays a big part in the destruction of Western democracy. He deserves the hate he is receiving. Providing internet to an insignificant fraction of the global population does not even begin to offset that.
gtsop 4 hours ago [-]
Or you know, we could use wires..
trenbologna 5 hours ago [-]
Does this create pollution? I don't think I want to inhale satellite dust.
ggreer 4 hours ago [-]
Current Starlink satellites are 800-970kg[1] and 100% of their mass is vaporized on reentry, so 1-2 satellites a day would be approximately 1.5 tons per day added to the atmosphere. The atmosphere's mass is 5.15 quadrillion tons. Even if satellite vapor stayed in the atmosphere forever, it would take approximately 10,000 years before it reached 1 part per billion.
This is correct from the perspective of direct health hazards, but there are still plausible risks. We know from history you don't need a lot of mass to cause global problems, if the material is catalytic.
ggreer 2 hours ago [-]
If the vaporized satellites were entirely converted into a compound that was as damaging to the ozone layer as the most potent CFC (R-12 [1]), and the compound stayed in the atmosphere forever, it would take 5,000 years to reach current atmospheric concentrations of R-12.[2]
Vaporized satellites really don't seem like a concern.
My point is, Starlink is doing this now, but they are continuing to scale up. Other companies are going to follow. Is there a point that this does become something to worry about because the scale has increased?
advisedwang 3 hours ago [-]
The launches are probably significantly worse!
JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago [-]
> launches are probably significantly worse
Kerosene rockets produce soot. Methalox rockets (like Starship) produce plain CO2 and water.
rurp 1 hours ago [-]
Hold on, are you saying that burning rocket fuel produces little to no pollution? As in, we could launch a million rockets per day with a negligible effect on the air and other environments? That's pretty surprising to me assuming I'm understanding correctly.
metalman 4 hours ago [-]
The real world concentrations of all of the elements that are in a satelite, dont go up by any measurable amount dues to space X sattelites burning up. What does have a huge impact is climate change causing industrial waste sites to dry up and spread dust, or just the inevitable increaes due to more human activity and mining for our resouce heavy consumption, especialy anything with chips, and batteries, exotic alloys in screens
mrguyorama 5 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately right now we just don't know how it will affect things.
But, it WILL affect things in climate and atmosphere.
It seems much better for an old non-functional Starlink satellite to burn up in the atmosphere instead of continuing in an uncontrolled orbit. I believe most burn-ups are controlled intentional deorbits.
Quoting a older post i made on the subject:
-------
Take in account, that a lot of those are replacement sats for the first generations that they are deorbiting already. Do not quote me on this, but its a insane amount (i though it was around 2k) of the first generation that they are deorbiting. If there is a issue, its not the amount of sats in space, but more the insane amount of deorbiting StarLink is doing.
Starlink wanted to put up insane numbers, but a lot of their fights contain a large percentage of replacement sats.
And they are getting bigger ... v1.5 is like 300kg, the v2.0 mini (ironic as its far from mini compared to its predecessors) are 800kg.
So before StarLink launched 60x v1.5's but now they are doing 21x v2.0 Mini's per launch.
The technology has been improving a lot, allowing for a lot more capacity per satellite. Not sure when they start launching v3's but those have like 3x the capacity for inner connects/ground stations and can go up to 1Gbit speeds (compared to the v2's who are again much more capable then multiple v1.5s).
So what we are seeing is less satellites per launch but more capacity per sat. This year is the last year that they are doing mass 1.5 launches, its all now going to the v2.0 "mini" (so 3x less sats).
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 accounting for energy, which natural burn-up has more of, or incomplete burn-up, which reduces the atmospheric effects of artificial mass.)
Broadly speaking, we don’t seem to be in a problematic place in respect of the atmosphere. Where improvement may be required is in moving from splashdown, where we sink space junk in the ocean, to targeted recovery.
[1] https://starlink-stories.cdn.prismic.io/starlink-stories/Z3Q...
[2] https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-elon-musk-next-gen-starlink...
[3] https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/asteroid-fast-fa...
Then again, so are CFCs, CO2, radioactive materials...
Just because some elements naturally occur on Earth doesn't mean we're completely insensitive to where they end up. (That said, I have no idea if atmospheric Aluminium is actually a problem or not.)
Obviously it requires a more scientific analysis but it does seem to me that burning a lot of shit on the atmosphere might be problematic.
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...
Satellite reentries in 2022 (ie mostly pre-megaconstellation) were already raising stratospheric AlO levels by 29.5% above normal levels (with satellites adding 'only' 17 t/year), but megaconstellations could raise that to ~480% above natural levels (360 t/year).
This isn't a rounding error, it's a non-trivial change in chemical composition across the entire globe, and effecting a complex and poorly-understood part of the climate system. What could go wrong?
What else can this effect (as usual, discovered belatedly) beyond ozone? Hopefully it's nothing! But I guess we're gonna find out...
[0] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL10...
Those findings are simulated, not observed. Hence "potential."
> it's a non-trivial change in chemical composition over the entire globe, and effecting a complex and poorly-understood part of the climate system. What could go wrong?
Perhaps a lot. Perhaps not much. It's a good question to study. But if this is an issue, it's solvable--carbon composite satellite structures could use a boost in demand and funding.
Of all the megaconstellations, SpaceX has historically been the best at being a "good neighbor," with low orbits for debris and lots of engineering to reduce brightness.[0] But hype around SpaceX gives the real bad actors a pass, for example AST is much worse on brightness,[1] and OneWeb and Qianfan are much worse on debris risk.[2]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNc5yCYth5E&t=1717s
[1] https://spacenews.com/astronomers-raise-interference-concern...
[2] https://spacenews.com/chinas-megaconstellation-launches-coul...
Starlink is easily one of my favorite engineering projects. I don't believe anybody has done it cheaper, better, or at wider scale than Starlink has.
> "In situ measurements showed evidence of a 1,000% increase in stratospheric aluminum levels from 1976 to 1984 (Zolensky et al., 1989), which was associated with the emission of hundreds of tons of such particles from solid rocket motors (SRM) during atmospheric ascent (Brady et al., 1994)"
If you follow Brady et al. (1994)[0], you'll read that every Space Shuttle launch (Table 1) deposited 112 tons of Al2O3 into the stratosphere (>15 km).
[0] https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA289852.pdf
This isn't a new phenomenon at all; in fact the peak alumina pollution from in the past (112 tons per STS launch) exceeds the worst-case future estimates from academic research (360 tons per year from satellite reentries).
(/meta Coincidentally, I once linked that exact Brady paper on HN, three years ago[1]. Actually, long before the current social media fad for being concerned about satellites. At the time I wrote, and this has truly aged well, "No one ever gave a shit").
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34812863
The importance of this distinction is acknowledged in Brady et al (1994):
The 17 t/year and 360 t/year figures are specifically for AlO nanoparticles (formed by hypersonic ablation), whereas Brady et al gives numbers for all AlO particles, regardless of size.Nice username btw.
Emphasis on negligible. Assuming 0.07 to 0.28 ppm lead [1] in meteoroids, space is dosing us with half to 2 kg a year [2].
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001670...
[2] https://earthsky.org/space/tons-of-extraterrestrial-dust-fal...
v1.5 is like 300kg, the v2.0 mini (ironic as its far from mini compared to its predecessors) are 800kg.
The V3's are the one's that need StarShip to deploy. But the current launch platform can take 21x v2.0 Mini's per launch vs the 60x v1.5's they did before.
Taking in account that the v2.0 Mini's are way more capably on a kg/capacity. And the tech keeps getting better. SpaceX does not really need Starship, that is more or less a bonus at this point.
Starship is the moat SpaceX needs to be developing today to stay ahead of where the Chinese competition will be in 5-10 years.
Human CO2 emissions are well under 10% of natural CO2 emissions, and yet that additional amount has been enough to increase the atmospheric concentration of CO2 by over 50% and substantially alter the planetary climate.
CO2 in the atmosphere is at a vastly larger scale than mass falling in from space, so that doesn't mean this is a problem, but that percentage certainly seems to indicate that the question should be studied further.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
For example, Starlink satellites orbit so low, that even if every single one of them collides and becomes dust, it will all decay and burn up in a matter of months, a couple years at most. The debris cannot physically move to higher orbits to affect other “normal” satellites, though it might impair launches.
Conversely, collisions at much higher geosynchronous orbits can’t possibly create a dense debris field as the total area is immense, deorbit will take millions of years, and everything is usually moving at the same speed (the synchronous part).
But all the bits the bits that end up with more energy than the orbit the satellites were on obviously do move up, and some bits will move up very substantially as we know from Mission Shakti debris: debris from that event at 300 km got apoapsis of up to ~2200 km.
That is way too long. The threshold we are speaking of cannot allow any fragments, because they start chain reaction and destroy more satellites. And there is always one which is on the highest level. What if that gets destroyed?
Kessler cascades are localised to specific orbits. In low-earth orbit, they're a problem for a few years.
They're going to be annoying. But not catastrophic.
> there is always one which is on the highest level
Highest level?
> They're going to be annoying. But not catastrophic.
I think there is a misunderstanding about the whole term. If it is not a big problem, then it does not meet the definition. So there must be some threshold where they aren't problem. What is that threshold? Because certainly there isn't space for infinite amount of objects. Primary question is that whether that threshold matters on practice. If it is 70k, then it is certainly a problem, but who knows the exact number yet.
> Highest level?
There is always the one which is classified orbiting on the highest level in LEO. Also that object can get destroyed; which means it will start deorbiting and with a chance to hit some other object below.
Way beyond anything we can currently achieve with current and planned launch capacity or radio technology.
> that object can get destroyed; which means it will start deorbiting and with a chance to hit some other object below
Got it, altitude.
Yes, in theory. In practice, the odds of that happening are vanishingly low. If it did happen, the volumes we're talking about are still so big that you'd struggle to come up with a way to cause a third collision even if we remove satellites' abilities to marginally change their orbits.
How are you so sure, when scientist have been debating this for decades?
> Got it, altitude.
Quibbling isn't an argument.
They have been. That's what I'm basing my arguments on.
You've been mentioning a ca. 70,000-bird limit. I think that comes from Bongers & Torres [1]. Their paper runs LEGEND (LEO-to-GEO Environment Debris Model). It does not distinguish between LEO and GEO. That's material because the natural decay period for an object in LEO is on the order of months to years, for LEO, to decades to centuries, for GEO.
Kessler in GEO? Real problem. If you wanted to be a space terrorist, you could probably engineer a cascade today that would make large sections of GEO unusuable for decades if not centuries. The point is that isn't possible for LEO, where you may make a mess in a few orbits for a few years at best.
> Quibbling isn't an argument
Sorry, wasn't quibbling. I genuinely couldn't tell what you meant by "highest level." (I was picturing a food chain, where big clouds of debris "eat" smaller satellites in their way.)
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092180092...
It's still a big problem to wipe out low orbit, but it's not a long lasting one.
> What is that threshold? Because certainly there isn't space for infinite amount of objects.
Even if you crash a billion objects together at 300km, they're all going to go away in a few years. There is no threshold for semi-permanently ruining low orbit.
You're not wiping out LEO, but a particular LEO.
You can pack many, many satellites into the same orbit without any danger, for example – as long as they move in the same direction. Let's make it 1000 for this thought experiment.
On the other hand, just two moving in opposite directions are obviously going to crash.
So is the number of "safe satellites in all of LEO" 1000 or 1?
Certainly less dangerous than something "going the wrong way" in a given orbital shell, but not sure if it's completely negligible either.
There are other factors, too - imagine you're trying to send a penny around the entire equator of the earth, and think of the largest possible explosion you could subject it to without vaporizing it. A stick of dynamite could launch a penny only around a half mile's distance around the equator, assuming ideal conditions, which is about .0025% of the circumference of the earth, which is 10% of the distance between the earth and the moon, and the moon is about 25% of the distance from which earth's gravity stops being a significant factor.
If you carefully deployed a large number of well timed series of dynamite sticks precisely located so that each blew up perfectly beneath the penny at its apex following each previous explosion - you'd need 150-300 sticks to get the penny out past the edge of the effective gravitational well, the point at which other factors in the solar system have the dominant influence - it'd effectively leave earth and start falling toward the sun. At any point closer to earth than that, it will slowly and inexorably return back to earth, reaching up to 25,000 mph before vaporizing itself in the atmosphere (if it fell from the outer edge). If you had no atmosphere, a clear shot, and the "ideal" penny cannon to launch it, you could hypothetically reach escape velocity with only a quarter stick of dynamite.
Incidental bursts of gas, or even outright exploding objects in space are not going to launch a bunch of stuff into much deeper orbit. There's a constant downward pull, and gas and dust creating drag and downward acceleration the closer in you get, and just vast, incomprehensible distances to travel under the influences of gravity. Getting things to go faster than 25,000mph, or reaching escape velocity, without vaporizing the thing you're trying to make go fast, requires as big a continuous explosion as you can make over as long a time period as possible.
I love that AI can whip up an xkcd style "What-If?" type scenario for these questions.
How many you can fit depends on the available technology. It should eventually be a lot more than 70K just in those low orbits... and still leave plenty of space for rocket launches and returns to thread their way in between them.
It is enough if it goes one round around. They can make a cascading effect which can destroy tens of satellites at once, and few fragments are enough. And closer to earth you are, less space there is. They can't all orbit on exactly the same level. There is always one which is on slightly higher level.
Humans are bad at intuiting exponents. There is roughly 200x more volume in LEO than there is between the ground and cruising altitude. Plane changes, moreover, take a lot of energy--you aren't going to get enough energy out of a collision to pollute nearby orbits.
There is no infinite space. The problem is exactly defining the number objects when that "small" amount of energy is actually enough to cause problems.
Straw man.
> problem is exactly defining the number objects when that "small" amount of energy is actually enough to cause problems
The exercise, maybe. The problem? No. In LEO, which is where Starlink orbits, there is no known solution for causing a Kessler cascade that causes more than a few billion in damage. Space isn't infinite, but it's really big.
Again, a few hundred thousand planes land every day [1]. They operate in a volume less than 1% that of LEO. To approach the object densities where we start controlling an airspace, you'd need tens of millions of objects in LEO alone. We simply do not have--not have any roadmap to having--the sort of launch capacity required to keep 30 million objects in LEO at a time.
There are real problems with more Starlinks in space. Kessler cascades are not one of them.
[1] https://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/number-of...
Sure they can: Leading/trailing each other is quite common. Intersecting orbits are riskier, but also possible without inevitable collisions.
Because there isn't a problem. LEO contains more than 200x the volume of commercial airspace.
We run out of spectrum and launch capacity well before Kessler cascades become a problem.
The further out you get, there's less atmospheric drag and each satellite is in view of the ground stations for longer but the cost of launch is higher and latency becomes a big issue. People expect 50ms latency for internet access not 500ms.
I will again note that if Saber Tooth tigers had put things in the orbits we have, it would still be our problem.
radio bandwidth: higher frequencies travel a shorter distance and provide more bandwidth. so you get frequency contention and also you need your sats to be physically closer
latency: the further a sat is, the higher the latency. not an issue for text messages. a huge issue for phone calls and general internet tasks. the further you "push" your sat "back", the worst the user experience is
there's other issues too, like geostationary vs geosynchronous and coverage and exposure.
Another 500 km won't affect latency much. It'll be around 3 more ms per round trip.
(Caveat: Not an expert by any means, just someone who had a similar question and did some reading, so my answer may well be incomplete or not fully correct.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit see "Use"
Not a real thing. (It was proposed as a possibility. We searched the parameter space. Mostly in the context of militaries trying to figure out how to deny orbits to an adversary. It's really difficult, to the point that even if one were intentionally trying to cause Kessler cascades, they wouldn't deny an adversary access to orbit.)
What cost mitigation are you referring to?
> thick armor plating
It makes about as much sense to armor a satellite as it does a plane. (Much less, actually, given the fuel costs are higher, energies in orbit are higher and densities orders of magnitude lower--to approximate the global density of airplanes in LEO, we'd need something like 4mm satellites up there. To approximate the density of controlled airspaces in LEO, we need about 10x that.)
> violence shenanigans outside my front door
Where the closest object to your front door is 10+ miles away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...
[1] https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-reentry-pollution-dama...
My start-up is called Strato Mines - collecting rare earths from 120km above earth. Willing to give 1% at a 100B valuation to any qualified investor.
And just as Tesla's stock goes up whenever there are reports about them no longer selling cars, or being years behind on self-driving tech and robotics... if Starlink would be publicly traded, their stock would now shoot way up.
On a more serious note: If analysts would do their job, they could have found out years ago that Starlink will never ever be profitable, just as no Sat ISP in history ever has been. All always have and are funded with tax-payer money.
Why is that? Simple maths.
Including R&D and launch cost and expected usage time, the TCO of one of their satellites will be somewhere in the area of $2,000,000. One of them in theory has a peak speed of 100 GBit/s. If you overbook the link by a factor of 10 as it is common for an ISP, that gives you 1,000 Gbit/s to sell.
So in best case over the lifetime of the system you will make a revenue of 1,000 * $100 * 36 months. So you end up somewhere in the area of $3,600,000. Yes, that is more than $2,000,000, but well, there are a couple of billions of investments and investor money here to be paid back one day.
"But why are you only assuming a usage time of 3 years?"
While Musk's idea of rapid R&D cycles is fine for Software, it's extremely expensive. The "Oops, the Sat-to-Sat links are not working, so we now have to build base stations everywhere and can not do load distribution" might have cost Starlink something like $10 BILLION? I guess I would have tested my stuff first before launching it. With now two generations of Starlink sats already being outdated and/or falling from the sky, the "in two weeks" promises from Musk don't make me very confident that Starlink v3 will actually be properly tested prior to polluting space with their buggy trash again.
But let's restart it in a much simpler way: A currently used commercial fiber cable can do 800 GBit/s, so eight times of a Starlink Satellite. Real-life data has already proven that the lifespan (outdated transceivers etc) is somewhere around 5-8 years, with the biggest risk being your cable getting cut. The cable itself costs virtually nothing. Due to this "developing" countries have mostly decided to not lay fiber underground. In Thailand for example, the fiber cables are simply thrown onto houses and through the jungle, as replacing them is dirt cheap. Anyway: If you map this to the TCO on 3 years as mapped above, this means compared to the TCO of $2,000,000 for Starlink, for fiber you are looking at something in the area of $10,000 instead. It's a no-brainer.
Real-life proof: I live on a tiny and very very remote Island in Asia. Some people used to have Starlink here. But due to their Satellites now being massively overbooked, speeds went down months to months. So people noticed that it is actually cheaper to run 10 KILOMETERS / 6 Miles of Fiber cable through the jungle. And on this tiny remote Island there are three Fiber ISPs to choose from. Two of them offer 1 GBit/s for $13 per month, and if you want a business service, for $40 you can get 2 GBit/s down / 1 GBit/s up. And unlike Starlink those ISPs are profitable.
You have to be EXTREMELY remote for Sat internet to make sense. No, not rural USA. Fiber will be cheaper. No, not Africa. Fiber through the desert will be cheaper. Sat Internet may make sense if you live in the artic or on mount Everest or something like that. Or Mars. In all other cases the TCO of Fiber will win.
Your entire analysis rests on this point, which you fail to demonstrate. (You also cite zero sources, which isn't encouraging.)
(EDIT: This assumption is conservative, but reasonable.)
Was this AI generated?
> The cable itself costs virtually nothing
Did you attempt to look up the cost of laying new fibre trunk?
> due to their Satellites now being massively overbooked, speeds went down months to months
Then this isn't a remote location. Starlink's economics have been pretty obvious for anyone who has been on a plane, boat or train in the last decade. They're also terrifically useful for remote mining, observation and military operations.
> people noticed that it is actually cheaper to run 10 KILOMETERS / 6 Miles of Fiber cable through the jungle
Well sure, if you ignore negative exernalities a lot of stuff is cheap.
Anyway, yes, I am a human.
And it is not that hard to find the sources for this point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshiel...
v1 constellation was completed in 2021, and decommissioned from 2024. v2 deployed from 2023, but the sat-to-sat communication is not working, so all of them, will need to be replaced by v3, too.
I don't believe you were a bot, but there were one or two phrasings that gave me pause. (If I believed you had written that with AI, I'd have just asked that and not bothered engaging.)
> v1 constellation was completed in 2021, and decommissioned from 2024. v2 deployed from 2023, but the sat-to-sat communication is not working, so all of them, will need to be replaced by v3, too
Fair enough. $3.6mm on $2mm--assuming $100,000 per month revenue and $2mm paid up front, which is unrealistically conservative--yields a 22% annualised. Take that out to the increasingly-attained design life of 5 years and it jumps to 25%. To put it bluntly, these are both incredibly high telecom returns.
You've already incorporated launch, maintenance, disposal, et cetera in TCO. So the remainder is customer service (usually 5 to 10% of revenue) and cost of capital. Even assuming 10% WACC, which is on the upper end for a leveraged telecom play, we're still comfortably generating excess return.
Where the comparison fall apart is in respect of fibre. Laying physical infrastructure is hard. You have long periods between capital outlay and return. Also, you have to right scale up front--you can't just launch more birds in a few months as demand scales (or hold them back if it doesn't).
You're not going to replace fibre with Starlink. But the economic case for the latter doesn't fall apart with 20%+ operating returns.
And yes, 22% yield sounds nice, but if someone would hand me their pitch deck and give me a SWAT analysis I would just laugh them away: The risks are far too high.
(See for example the article that this very thread is about.)
Of course you can only guess based on that, but it looks that in real life things are worse:
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/02/starlink-profit-growin...
These data points might be interpreted as "Starlink is getting 40% of their revenue from tax money".
And while "7 million subscribers" might sound impressive on first sight: This is the number of DSL connections subscribed to in the tiny country of Belgium. But for magical reasons Starlink is valuated at a price higher than if you would buy all of Belgium ;)
Your point in regards of laying physical infrastructure is valid for a lot of western countries. But not all of them. Some countries in the EU for example years ago created laws that say that whoever opens the street for any reasons has to put in empty tubes for someone to later put in fiber before closing the street again.
So: This is a regulatory subject really, not physical cost. Fiber is dirt cheap if you are allowed to use existing power poles for example (which is unlike with copper obviously not a problem in regards of signal integrity), or existing underground pipes, or just throw it from house roof to house roof.
Your revenue figures are consumer only. And while you're generous on utilization factor, we capitalised the TCO up front while amortising revenue, and then reduced asset tenure to worst case observed during development.
Flex up to 4 years, let $1mm TCO be paid up front and the rest amortised, and reduce utilisation to 80% ($80k/month revenue) and IRR shoots up to 73%. Take TCO to $3mm ($1mm up front, $2mm amortised), reduce utilisation to 75% and we're still over 20%.
> while "7 million subscribers" might sound impressive on first sight: This is the number of DSL connections subscribed to in the tiny country of Belgium. But for magical reasons Starlink is valuated at a price higher than if you would buy all of Belgium
Well, yes. Starlink connections are more profitable and you can't scale selling internet to Belgium into a Starshield defence contract. Or selling to airlines and cruise ships and yachts and mining operations, all of which pay more than a Belgian.
> some countries in the EU for example years ago created laws that say that whoever opens the street for any reasons has to put in empty tubes for someone to later put in fiber before closing the street again
Starlink doesn't sense in densely-populated areas of the EU or Asia. (And the equivalent for SpaceX would be ridesharing Starlink on someone else's flight.)
> Fiber is dirt cheap if you are allowed to use existing power poles for example
If you have the scale. You're underestimating the risk that comes from having to place infrastructure up front.
Your analysis is pretty solid. But I don't think it's taking into account the fact that you can build multibillion-dollar telecoms business on a few tens of millions of high-paying customers.
And please keep in mind that while you are right that there is a risk investing into physical infrastructure also applies to Starlink. It's worth remembering here that all Sat Internet companies prior to Starlink had failed and needed to be rescued with tax payer money.
I don't have exact numbers, and it's a bit muddy due to state subsidiaries, but in Germany the average cost to connect a subscriber in a medium density town with fiber, with given that nothing was prepared and you have to open the street etc appears to be in region of €/$ 2,000 or so.
I don't know if that is done in the US, but also in Europe we now do "trenching". It has some downsides and pitfalls, but this reduces the upfront infrastructure cost for fiber massively.
Absolutely. It's why I think assuming the WACC of a highly-leveraged telecom (around 10%) is appropriate.
> this reduces the upfront infrastructure cost for fiber massively
Fibre makes sense where there is density. It's higher capacity and cheaper. That doesn't mean it makes sense everywhere. And a lot of that everywhere will pay a lot of money for connectivity.
The global telecom market generates trillions of dollars of annual revenue [1]. There is a lot of fruit for the picking.
[1] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/global-t...
The laser based inter-links still not working has been subject on various conferences like AngaCOM etc.
But in my case: I have simply tried it *). And every Starlink user can do it, too: Use traceroute. And if you think "they might be hiding the hop-to-hops between Sats!", you can dig deeper using MTR behind the modem or simply rooting the modem itself.
Last time I have connected to a v3 Sat however was ~6 months ago. Maybe an active user reading this can try today?
The simpler answer is intra-constellation communication is a bleeding-edge technology. It's an extraordinary challenge for which extraordinary proof is needed to show success, not the other way around. SpaceX has solved most of the gating technical problems. But getting it to work reliably enough that it becomes more economic than ground-based backhaul will take time.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1eg4e4d/starlink_...
Have a look at the downtimes of the system.
A simple way to verify that their inter-sat links are not working and/or are not used is to simply sit and wait: If you are switched from one Sat to the next, you get new "session" and previous NAT state is lost. If this would be a meshed backbone, that would not happen.
It's crazy to me that people use AI to generate comments for social sites of all things, but here we are.
To be honest, while I took it lightly, others might feel pretty insulted by such claims. De-humanizing someone stinks.
This has nothing to do with profitability. DoD/War Dept contracts are "tax payer money" and shareholders are happy to have those.
>it is actually cheaper to run 10 KILOMETERS / 6 Miles of Fiber cable through the jungle
Cheaper, sure. But try getting this approved in the US through a County Planning Commission. And you did get NEPA/CEQA done too right?
>No, not rural USA. Fiber will be cheaper.
My not-that-rural town has fiber only 80% of town. Houses with city sewer/water don't have fiber
In my ex home town in Germany we had the exact same thing as you are describing - Fiber available everywhere up to 20 meters away from our house, and no chance to get it connected. For purely regulatory reasons.
You don't seem to understand their strategy: Constant replacement is a feature, not a bug, to them.
And in that paradigm, why wait any longer than absolutely necessary with any given launch? The problem is already fixed – at least inter-satellite links seem to be working well enough now (as evidenced by global coverage on the oceans).
> Starlink will never ever be profitable, just as no Sat ISP in history ever has been.
How do you explain the non-zero stock price of e.g. Iridium and Viasat?
> You have to be EXTREMELY remote for Sat internet to make sense. No, not rural USA. Fiber will be cheaper.
Are you sure laying fiber to every last home is really more capital efficient in the long term? Have you done the math on that side too?
And what about mobile coverage? Even solar-powered low maintenance cell stations need to be installed, repaired after storms, have their solar cells dusted off etc.
> No, not Africa. Fiber through the desert will be cheaper. Sat Internet may make sense if you live in the artic or on mount Everest or something like that.
Mount Everest has pretty good cell signal, as far as I know. It's a tiny area, compared to actually remote but still (sparsely) populated regions.
As discussed elsewhere in this thread, the intra-links still do not seem to be enabled. Can not verify myself due not having a yacht and/or time, but I am constantly flying between Asia and Europe with various airlines, and so far none of them have switched to Starlink but keep paying the outrageous pricing from ViaSat & co.
Let's see what happens once the bubble pops.
What's the bubble? It's cash-flow positive. All of SpaceX is cash-flow positive--they've been buying back their own shares.
You can argue it's overrated, i.e. customers will drop it after trying it for a while. (Or when a recession forces their hand.) But bubble requires leverage and losses, neither of which SpaceX (or Starlink) have.
As for SpaceX, it's pretty much impossible to know their finances - they don't publish audited accounts. We can just trust what Elon is willing to share with us.
Are you arguing that the demand in Internet connectivity in rural/remote areas is somehow caused by an investment bubble as opposed to a long-term stable need?
SpaceX has audited financials. They're not published, but they leak a lot.
SpaceX isn't leaking their own financials.
As others have pointed out already in this thread: No serious analyst and not even Starlink themselves have claimed to be profitable. They have claimed to be operationally profitable. This means that the cost of operating the sats is lower than the revenue they make. It does leave out all other cost. Yes, if they could build and launch the Sats for free instead of ~$2 million per piece, that could be a profitable business.
Also, have you actually used Starlink? It's crap. Yes, in 2023 when they did not have customers you got decent speeds. Now it's completely overbooked. Yes, you can make a year of profits milking existing customers.
Google "Starlink benchmark" or "Starlink feedback" etc and you will see things like these:
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/starlink.com
At this point Starlink's active customer base is rating their service to be worse than... cancer, I guess?
Nothing in their analysis is conspiratorial. It's flawed. But not alleging conspiracy.
SpaceX is obviously quite profitable. They're obviously spending many billions annually on salaries, Starlink launches and Starship development yet they haven't raised significant money via debt or equity financing rounds in the last few years.
You don't get numbers like that by subsidizing it from the ~$1B/year launch business.
https://www.advanced-television.com/2025/10/01/forecast-8-2m...
That's how SpaceX justifies its launch capabilities. Their strategy of using assembly line techniques to build reusable rockets make no sense unless there is a lot of stuff to launch. Satellites are crazy expensive, and the launch represents only a smaller part of the total budget, so even if the launch was free, there is only so much demand.
Starlink is more than half of SpaceX launches, building their own demand.
And replacing satellites regularly was the plan. I don't know how they did their report, but they certainly budgeted it internally. SpaceX is a private company, they tell you what they want to tell you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
It's good to look at the costs vs. benefits of everything, but satellite networks are way far down on my list of concern (and I do some astrophotography).
A strong and trustworthy global democracy to enforce it, and to provide for the general welfare of everyone currently trapped in car-based cities... Is left as a simple exercise to the reader
There is a reason these taxes are popular among rich countries and opposed by emerging ones.
Has it?
Destroying the Amazon destroys information. Light pollution simply raises the cost of our accessing it. I suppose one could model this out to some effect on deep-space astronomy's productivity. But if that effect is real--and I've seen zero evidence it is--the solution is a tax on satellite launches to fund more observatories.
Then it should be easy to cite. Astronomers have complained. But I haven't seen anyone link that to output, including the complaining astronomers.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-023-01904-2
These are not risks to be ignored. But we haven't even observed or quantified them, which is the first step to weighing mitigation options. (Which could be physical, e.g. lowering satellite reflectivity. Or geographic, putting more observatories are higher latitudes. Or even statistical, by launching space-based calibration telescopes, or building more array-based observatories.)
"Workin' in these coal mines ain't hurt me none no-how."
Last and most importantly, Starlink exists is to create revenue for SpaceX and to fund the Starship program. The value to humanity of Starship succeeding at its goals is extremely high.
Starship to orbit sounds useful, but Starship to Mars is near useless. If that's what rich people want to spend their money on, go nuts.
I strongly disagree.
If "Starship to Mars" is a possibility, then so is "Starship to the asteroid belt". It's very close to "Starship to the asteroid belt, capture asteroid, return to Earth orbit" - and that's very close to orbital mining of metals that are rare and valuable on Earth.
To put this into perspective, an Earth-Mars round trip costs about 15 km/s; Earth-main Belt about 13 km/s.
You'd need to add Δv for returning the mass of the asteroid. But you get your reaction mass for "free."
(To be clear, we are hundreds of billions of dollars of capex and decades away from asteroid mining. But the work to get there is decently in line with the work we would need to establish a logistical chain to Mars and back.)
Apollo to the Moon was near useless by that metric. We wouldn't have Starship to orbit if we hadn't gone to the moon.
I beg to disagree. I see no value at all. This must be one of those accelerationist or extropianist/utilitarian beliefs.
If humanity agreed with this statement, humanity would fund the program directly through investment, donations or taxes, the same way we fund roads and schools which we also value highly.
...Starlink and SpaceX are funded through investments and taxes. When they launch a non-profit's satellite I guess, indirectly, through donations, too.
Also, what? Why is the funding source a measure of value?
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.
How does "getting mass to orbit" benefit all of humanity more than what we have now? Not that much, I think, but maybe you have some inside scoop that the rest of us don't know about.
No, it isn't. Starlink's entire commercial value is in being able to perform high-mass / low-latency launch to LEO. There is some fun stuff on the Moon. And a long-term pitch on Mars. But the commercial branding has always been about LEO.
> How does "getting mass to orbit" benefit all of humanity more than what we have now?
Better Earth observation. Better space observation. Communications outside our ecology versus based on wires strung through it.
Let's reverse the question. For the environmental impact of space launch, what else do we do that's more-agreeably useless?
https://www.google.com/search?q=spacex+movie+mars&oq=spacex+...
Google tells me exactly this:
>"Yes, SpaceX's Starship is being developed with the explicit goal of transporting humans and cargo to Mars, with Elon Musk aiming for the first uncrewed test missions to send robotic Tesla bots by 2026 and crewed missions potentially beginning around 2029 or 2031. The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and is the world's most powerful launch vehicle, intended to eventually establish a self-sustaining city on the planet."
It's pretty wasteful to blow up starship after starship after starship when they could have spent that money launching normal rockets for their satellite deployments.
Of course spacex probably wants to rebrand starship now that Mars is looking like the very stupid plan that it was.
There are better things humanity could be doing with the time and money spent blowing up "starship" after "starship". And really, why name it "starship" if it's just meant for LEO? Because it wasn't intended for LEO, that's why. It's a rebrand. Just call it "LEOship" if it's just going to be launching satellites.
It's yet one more case of Musk over-promising and under-delivering.
Could this reflect your media diet?
> never once heard that "Starship" will be used to launch even more starlink satellites
That's kind of wild. I understand getting the PR stuff first, but every newspaper I read mentions Starlink whenever SpaceX comes up, unless it's about a launch explosion or Artemis.
> pretty wasteful to blow up starship after starship after starship when they could have spent that money launching normal rockets for their satellite deployments
V3 doesn't fit on smaller rockets. And Starship's launch costs promise to be much lower than the Falcons.
> why name it "starship" if it's just meant for LEO? Because it wasn't intended for LEO, that's why
Starship isn't an interstellar platform...
It's interesting how if it's anti-elon, it's ok to complain about how the poor are causing the privileged some difficulties.
Running cables across out land is less impactful than lofting satellites?
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.
Is this some AI answer or did you foobar this math by a factor of 100?
StarLink got 2 million new subscribers in 2024. Meanwhile the internet got 200 million new users. So even if every new StarLink subscriber would be a new internet user (which is obviously not true) they would still only account for 1% of new internet users. The real number is off course much much much lower.
> It's interesting how if it's anti-elon, it's ok to complain about how the poor are causing the privileged some difficulties.
Now it is up to you to show that this has outsized influence on impoverished communities.
According to ITU[1] the number one factor for lack of internet access is economical. The price of internet access can be reduced with traditional infrastructure, but governments are often unable or unwilling to invest in the infrastructure needed to bring faster and cheaper internet connectivity to underserved areas. StarLink should in theory fit perfectly here, but in reality very few people from underserved communities, especially in impoverished areas, can afford StarLink, and keep being underserved. What makes this even worse is that in the rich countries (like the USA and Australia) underserved communities that had been promised infrastructure to bring the broadband internet are facing delays and cancellations because politicians believe the community can get StarLink instead (when in fact they cannot afford it). This is known as the Uber effect (from when politicians used Uber as an excuse to cancel public transit projects).
1: https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2024/11/10/ff24...
This is similar to how the existence of Uber has caused delays or cancellation of public transit projects because politicians were able to say the people were better served with Uber than public transit.
Economic opportunity is largely shifting towards not only having internet access, but performant internet access.
Costs will come down. There will be alternatives.
But they might have taken much longer to come to market without something like this.
I'm not a fanboy, but there's obviously a lot of people who have worked hard to make Starlink a reality.
StarLink provides a great oportunity for politicians to delay or cancel projects which would otherwise have given broadband connection to underserved areas. In urban planning this is known as the Uber effect.
Broadband internet via cables, fiber optics, and radio towers is state of the art in telecommunication infrastructure. Satellite is both slower, more limited, and more prone to various disruptions. The capabilities of the wires and the radio towers is also improving. 5 years ago we didn’t have 5G towers, and 20 years ago fiber optics seemed a distant dream. The only thing freezing traditional telecommunication infrastructure in place are dreams of low earth orbit satellites which will never materialize.
If I understand your analogy correctly (which I‘m not sure I do) this is like looking at the new technology of pneumatic tubes and stipulating that all postal delivery will be done using this new technology in the future, and we may as well stop funding the national postal service, remove mail-rooms from our ships and trains, because somebody will build a pneumatic tube that will deliver mail door to door between New York and Chicago.
So basically it's not worth worrying about.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#v2_(initial_deploymen...
Vaporized satellites really don't seem like a concern.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichlorodifluoromethane#Enviro...
2. https://gml.noaa.gov/hats/graphs/graphs.html
My point is, Starlink is doing this now, but they are continuing to scale up. Other companies are going to follow. Is there a point that this does become something to worry about because the scale has increased?
Kerosene rockets produce soot. Methalox rockets (like Starship) produce plain CO2 and water.
But, it WILL affect things in climate and atmosphere.
https://csl.noaa.gov/news/2025/427_0428.html
"Pollution" is what this is