[lxgr]

I didn't say "ruin forever". "Elon-exclusive for a couple of years" honestly sounds bad enough.

There's not only Starlink in LEO. Some of the existing constellations there are safety-of-life relevant (e.g. Iridium for polar flights or shipping routes), and Iridium doesn't have a stockpile of spares sitting on launchpads for an "Elon poked the bear one too many times" scenario.

[robertlagrant]

> Some of the existing constellations there are safety-of-life relevant (e.g. Iridium for polar flights or shipping routes), and Iridium doesn't have a stockpile of spares sitting on launchpads for an "Elon poked the bear one too many times" scenario.

Iridium is only useful in safety-of-life because it's too expensive for anything else. If SpaceX were that bad at creating a market for satellites no one would be trying to shoot their satellites down.

[greenish_shores]

Not to nitpick, but polar flights can (and do, as a back-up, sometimes not only) use HF comms (which do not rely on a line-of-sight, as the waves are long enough to "bounce" off the ionosphere). It's slow (~300bps if transmitting data?), sometimes (but rarely) can have latency up to 15 minutes (interference from the Sun and others stars breaking/jamming comms for some short time, along other phenomenons), but it works. Even 15 years ago not every commercial airplane had satcom link installed, and even now, HF is the only thing which is required when flying away from VHF range. But anyway satcom is just more convenient usually (as long as it is available and it works).

On the other hand, I also think that some *ground* safety systems will rely on satellite data links as a back-up, as well.

[lxgr]

Yes, but does that make it any less useful for safety-of-life, especially given that Starlink is not even a viable alternative for that application yet?

[robertlagrant]

No one's saying it makes it less useful for that.

[aaronblohowiak]

Iridium is 140 miles further away from earth than starlink, though..

[lxgr]

I could imagine that in a head-on intercept of an Iridium satellite, some of the debris might make it into higher or lower orbital shell, but to be fair I don't know how realistic that actually is.

[jcims]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision

[lxgr]

Oh, I was aware of that even but not of that debris distribution graph. Thank you!

So it does seem like some debris making it into higher and lower orbital shells is quite likely.