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The sun is killing off SpaceX's Starlink satellites
(www.newscientist.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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The headline is pretty misleading. The solar maximimum lowers their time in orbit by up to ten days. The article also mentions that this is beneficial to SpaceX as it means the end of life satellites will re-enter faster, getting them out of the way for their replacements.
They can deorbit them at any time though?
As far as I'm aware, yes. Maybe the article meant they could use less fuel to do so?
any fuel is... already in space, it's not like they're getting it back if they don't use it
I just looked it up, and yes they deorbit the satellites, but their re-entry orbit takes up to six months. So speeding that up does seem advantageous.
I reread the article, I reckon it's about satellites in general deorbiting faster to avoid a Kessler syndrome scenario
then just this once our interests align, because that probably lowers the chance of a Kessler Syndrome scenario, which was always my main concern in relation to this satellite swarm bullshit
They're in way too low an orbit to pose a Kessler threat since any debris would fall back down on a scale of a few months to under a decade. The danger comes from stuff that's at decade-to-century lifetimes.
Starlink sucks for a bunch of other reasons like the huge rocket emissions to put a bunch of astronomy-polluting garbage in space that's designed to fail.
They also have massively increased the level of aluminum oxide in the atmosphere from all the satellites burning up (something like a 30% increase over baseline), which might damage the ozone layer.
Apparently half of all active satellites are Starlink and they plan to increase the current number by ~8x.
holy shit, I knew it was bad but not that bad