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Starlink Worries keep me awake.

sufferingsam

ULTIMATE Member
Just read that there are currently 6241 Starlink satellites in orbit as of July 2024.

The plan is for a constellation of 42,000 satellites (most of them low Earth Orbits) !

The average lifespan of each of this satellite is approx 5 years. If a few thousands of them start faltering / failing and start hitting in-flight aricrafts, Will it count as a doomsday scenario? Imagine the repurcussions, if only a few of those 22,000 aircrafts airborne on any given average day, are brought down by a few failures only !

More likely than a nuclear armageddon.
 
They're fairly small and so are designed to quickly burn up in the atmosphere, but that's not to say there aren't other risks with all these mega constellations going aloft. I'll move this to the satellite category.
 
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Just read that there are currently 6241 Starlink satellites in orbit as of July 2024.

The plan is for a constellation of 42,000 satellites (most of them low Earth Orbits) !

The average lifespan of each of this satellite is approx 5 years. If a few thousands of them start faltering / failing and start hitting in-flight aricrafts, Will it count as a doomsday scenario? Imagine the repurcussions, if only a few of those 22,000 aircrafts airborne on any given average day, are brought down by a few failures only !

More likely than a nuclear armageddon.

I don't know if we're going to actually see 42k satellites in orbit. They all ask for permission to launch a large number so they don't need to keep asking for permission to launch more.

Some of the satellites will obviously fail, but most will be de-orbited by SpaceX/their operators when they get old/something's not working well/are running low on propellant. Most shouldn't be a danger to aircraft.

But with so many satellites from different providers and countries at similar altitudes, the risk of the kessler syndrome becoming a thing is higher. At least low earth orbit should be clean after ~10 years... if we're going to mess up, it's better to mess up LEO than higher altitudes.

The blinking red/yellow dots on https://satellitemap.space/ are the satellites being decommissioned.
 
And Murphy's Law will come into play too !

Small unburnt metal specks from decommisioned Satellites ripping through low flying commercial Airliners at supersonic speeds!
 
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