What is going on guys?
Meh, personally good riddance. Could lose another 95% of their fleet if it’s on me. Then telescopes no longer have to account for the satellites constantly streaking through their view.
But yeah, highly personal opinion of course, if you get internet from this I bet you would rather not want them gone. 😅
According to Space.com in July 2023, there were 4,487 active Starlink satellites. 26 represents just over 0.5% of the total constellation. Considering it seems like a swarm-type system, 0.5% strikes me as simply the cost of doing business.
Edit: decimals.
You forgot to move the decimal over when converting it to a percent. It’s 0.58%. I agree it’s still not much, but it’s one day. That stacks up fast.
Aye, I did thank you for the correction.
So at its current rate, all of the satellites in orbit in the next year?
From what I read another article, these satellites are beginning to reach their end-of-life. This means that more and more are beginning to fail, and without launching a whole new fleet of them soon, it will only be a short matter of time before they all fail.
This means an enormous amount of new space junk will now be in orbit contributing to the already massive amount of space junk that is a growing problem with no fix on the horizon (pun intended).
Low earth orbit- they burn up on reentry when they destabilize
This was (probably) the biggest reason they pushed so hard to create a re-usable rocket system. That shit gets expensive to replace.
Does all the burned gases fall back to earth?
Is vaporizing metal and raining or trapping it in the atmosphere benign?
It’s benign. Just shy of 50 tons of random space debris burn up in the atmosphere a day from non-human sources. Four Star Link satellites weight just over a ton.
The earth is normally getting hit with roughly 200 satellites worth of material a day, and it’s not even noticable beyond the shooting stars.
Becoming non-functional isn’t the same as destabilizing in their orbit. Can they be made to then destabilize and burn up?
They are low enough air resistance will pull them down and burn them up over the course of a few months if they don’t do station keeping
An inherent characteristic of any satellite in low earth orbit is that they will burn up without maintenance. This is because there is significant drag on LEO satellites from a very, very thin atmospheric remnant. Anything in a LEO orbit will burn up eventually, without periodic boost from thrusters.
They are
Earth’s gravity is pulling them in, even the ISS which is farther away has thrusters to correct itself from earths pull. While working they thrust themselves to stay in prbit. These are much closer and once they’re non-functioning they won’t be able to keep themselves from falling (“orbital decay”)
The satellite burning up on re-entry is part of what makes starlink such an expensive proposition. SpaceX can’t fix them, they can’t re-use solar panels or wiring harnesses. No part of the shell or shielding. It’s all just…gone.
SpaceX are launching 26-52 satellites at a time and have sustained 3 launches a week for most of the year.
The satellites are in a Low Earth Orbit, without constant thrust, atmospheric drag will force them to re enter earths atmosphere within a few months. This means they aren’t adding to junk in space.
Unlike Nasa, ULA, Arriannespace, RoscosMos, etc… SpaceX have always performed 2nd Stage Deorbit burns, so they aren’t adding to Space junk by launching either.
The Low Earth Orbit is to ensure low latency and the need for constant thrust means the satellites have a short life expectancy by design. That is why SpaceX fought to keep the satellites as cheap as possible (e.g. $250k)
First stage booster reuse and fairing reuse means the majority of the launch cost is the second stage ($15 million).
The whole lot is privately funded
It’s sustained by NASA. Our tax dollars.
I thought NASA only paid SpaceX to fund NASA’s launches, not SpaceX’s launches. And still a lot cheaper than NASA’s own programs.
NASA is a waste of money itself, however $2,000,000 accounts for half of the budget of Space X. If each rocket launch is $67,000,000 and they do 50 a year that’s about 30 launches on the house.
This right here proves you are an idiot who doesn’t have any idea what he is talking about. Shut the hell up dude.
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So we wase 60 million a launch on 5,000 satellites so far. I’m actually curious to what the math is if all of these fall down for losses.
The point of the article is they have lost almost 300 now in 2 months. That’s 5% of their fleet.
Losing a chunk (5%) of their satellites in a couple months, sounds like they got roughly a 5 year expectancy, doesn’t sound so good.
They would have to constantly be launching them. How expensive is this and can they realistically make a profit? I don’t see it being easy.
Kessler Syndrome goes brrrrr.
I was under the impression that this wasnt a big risk with starlink as they are in a lower (around 550km), which means potential debris will decay rather than stay in a stable orbit.
They are low earth orbit satellites, this is expected and most likely planned for.
They’ve lost almost 300 now in 2 months. That’s 5% of the fleet in 2 months. Not normal, also why are shilling for hundreds of millions of dollars in wasted satellites.
They started launching in 2019, according to a quick look at Wikipedia. They told the general public (and regulatory agencies, I think) that the lifetime of the satellites was on the order of 5 years. The plan was to replace them frequently enough to maintain the constellation with that kind of service life (i.e. to launch the whole constellation worth of satellites every 5 years)
Now, here we are 4 years later. It’s not terribly surprising if some of the early satellites are starting to reach the end of their lives.
It’s going to be very expensive for them, but not an unexpected cost. This is the reason they’re so keen to start launching them on Starship
All that pollution…sigh…
It might still be less environmentally damaging that running fibre to every starlink customer. That’s a lot of manufacturing and digging.
How did our tax dollars agree to this.
SpaceX have funded it privately. It apparently started operating at a profit this year.
It’s funded by NASA. Who funds NASA.
The entire company is not funded by NASA
No, but to say it’s profitable without NASA is a stretch.
SpaceX is privately funded, NASA buys launches for it’s own purposes, but StarLink isn’t subsidized
Who funds NASA.
Whoever is funding NASA should devote more funding to education - the need is clearly evident from your comments.
Low effort shill post.
Dude, you sound like a jackass.
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An Elon Musk company being mismanaged and going bankrupt? Shocker
