I'm giving my first colloquium talk on satellite pollution since November tomorrow (online for St Mary's University in Halifax) and I am SO tired of giving this super depressing talk.
So I'm going to to restructure it from "Satellites are ruining the night sky" to "Here are guidelines for sat companies to not destroy the sky, the atmosphere, and orbit." I started this process last time I gave this talk and it definitely felt a lot more positive.
Still pretty depressing though.
The first thing I have to do every time I give this talk is update the number of Starlink satellites, which always hurts, but it's going to be worse since it's been 3 months...
swearing about satellites
Oooof almost 400 more in 3 months. Fuck.
3,633 Starlinks in orbit out of 3,930 launched (failure rate still ~10%, gross)
7,312 total sats in orbit. Well fuck, Starlink is finally about to pass the 50% OF ALL SATELLITES mark.
Think about that: 50% of all satellites are owned by the same ego-maniac billionaire who most of us here on Mastodon are now extremely familiar with. This is so bad.
I was searching to find out how much bigger the Starlink Gen2 sats are and found a quote from a letter I wrote to the FCC in 2 different articles that I didn't get interviewed for. Which is...weird. But I guess nice that somebody actually read my letter?
The Starlink Gen2 sats are apparently each 7m x 3m and 1250 kg, the size and almost the same weight as a Ford F-150, in case you were wondering.
But of course, this isn't actually public information that you can find officially anywhere, because private companies are awful, so I'm just gathering this from press releases.
swearing about satellites
Oh god I redid the math on re-entries:
Each Starlink v2 sat weighs 1250kg. They plan to have 42,000 of them in orbit.
Each satellite has a planned lifetime of 5 years. That means they'll be de-orbiting and replacing ALL of them every 5 years.
That comes to 23 sats per day, which is 29 TONS OF SATELLITE every day.
It doesn't go away, it gets added to the upper atmosphere. Most of the mass is aluminum. What the hell is that going to do?
WHY THE FUCK IS THIS OK?!
And yes, there are about 50-60 tons of meteorite material that gets added to the Earth's atmosphere every day (shooting stars), but that's mostly silicates. This is going to be WAY more than the natural amount of metal added to the upper atmosphere.
But please, FCC, tell me again how Low Earth Orbit is not subject to environmental regulations.
@sundogplanets Ah, I see. Is aluminum more harmful to the atmosphere or people than silicates?
Skimming Wikipedia doesn't give me anything that sounds dangerous (some slight environment effects such as inhibiting gill-breathing in acidic water and plant-growth on acidic soil).
I wonder how much aluminum ground-based entities emit into the atmosphere.
@niplav
Even if the effect of injecting vaporised aluminum in the atmosphere would very similar to that of silicon, doubling the amount from meteorites might be significant.
(But I am not an atmospheric scientist, and I don't know anything about this stuff.)
@mr_forsberg @sundogplanets Unfortunately mistakes rarely cancel out
@sundogplanets
Ah to be clear on the policy level I absolutely think that we should Harberger-tax the orbits around the earth and Pigou-tax releasing material into the atmosphere by deorbiting satellites.