[bryanlarsen]

> Say they run into financial issues and cease operations.

Then the last thing they'll do will be to deorbit the satellites.

You also missed a major factor in your calculations -- the odds that a collision will raise the odds of further collisions. And that's zero. The vast majority of collisions are with centimeter size objects, which aren't going to shatter a Starlink. And if you collide with something large enough to shatter a Starlink, then it will remove enough energy from the orbits of most of the objects that they'll deorbit within a single orbit.

[iracigt]

It's true that the bigger question is "what is the impact of a collision?". For many of them, the answer is probably nothing. In an industry where 1 in 10,000 makes people uncomfortable though, I think it's enough be to be potential headache. Increasing density of LEO would make that worse. It doesn't need to be a runaway effect to be economically or especially politically problematic.

Proactively deorbiting at EoL is definitely the correct move, but requires enough runway to continue short term operations. I can absolutely picture this being used as political leverage.

[BWStearns]

I imagine if SpaceX was financially toast and trying to ransom LEO for a bailout then we'd probably just Defense Production Act them and give them a loan for only enough to pay the staff to deorbit the constellation.

[bagels]

It's probably true that energy is removed from the whole system, but I don't think it's correct to say that each piece of resulting debris has lower energy, some do gain energy, or lose very little.

[BWStearns]

Just to contrive a counterexample, what about a collision from a higher eccentricity object near its perigee? That could be adding a lot of energy I think, no?