[varenc]

This article has a somewhat alarmist tone, but isn't this just Starlink working as intended?

It seems much better for an old non-functional Starlink satellite to burn up in the atmosphere instead of continuing in an uncontrolled orbit. I believe most burn-ups are controlled intentional deorbits.

[benjiro]

Yep, those are the original / older gen sats, that have way less capacity then the newer models. They are moving away from tons of small sats and more to larger (with longer life time) sats that have multiple times the capacity, of the combined smaller sats.

Quoting a older post i made on the subject:

-------

Take in account, that a lot of those are replacement sats for the first generations that they are deorbiting already. Do not quote me on this, but its a insane amount (i though it was around 2k) of the first generation that they are deorbiting. If there is a issue, its not the amount of sats in space, but more the insane amount of deorbiting StarLink is doing.

Starlink wanted to put up insane numbers, but a lot of their fights contain a large percentage of replacement sats.

And they are getting bigger ... v1.5 is like 300kg, the v2.0 mini (ironic as its far from mini compared to its predecessors) are 800kg.

So before StarLink launched 60x v1.5's but now they are doing 21x v2.0 Mini's per launch.

The technology has been improving a lot, allowing for a lot more capacity per satellite. Not sure when they start launching v3's but those have like 3x the capacity for inner connects/ground stations and can go up to 1Gbit speeds (compared to the v2's who are again much more capable then multiple v1.5s).

So what we are seeing is less satellites per launch but more capacity per sat. This year is the last year that they are doing mass 1.5 launches, its all now going to the v2.0 "mini" (so 3x less sats).

[smallerize]

They keep the satellites relatively low for latency, and that means they still need a lot of them for line-of-sight coverage, right? They have plans to add 15,000 more satellites. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/starlinks-ambiti...

[asadotzler]

They had global line of site coverage long ago, but with limited capacity. Now they're growing capacity.

[rtpg]

But if they're adding larger capacity ones that still have the same failure mode, then the "1 to 2 a day" becomes even worse right?

Or are those larger ones also ones that have a longer shelf life?

[MiguelHudnandez]

The scale of the Starlink constellation is really not what people expect when they think of satellites. To get a sense for just how many of these have already been launched, check out this interactive map.

https://satellitemap.space/

(~8,500 actively in orbit)

[jacquesm]

Deorbiting the v 1.5 has a far lower chance of anything hitting the ground than the bigger ones.

[ChuckMcM]

True, but their demising technology appears to be quite good too. I had an interesting discussion at the Small Satellite conference in Utah with folks about demising and they mentioned starlink. "Good" demising has the 'slipstream' layer of the satellite burn up quickly on de-orbit and then the other bits are made purposely non-aerodynamic, especially with fastners which are designed to burn quickly to rapidly disassemble to satellite while it is still quite high so that the smaller pieces will have enough altitude to get to their "full demising" velocity on the way down.

The team I'm working with is just doing a cube sat which has pretty straightforward demising but overall it was interesting to see the thought and strategy that people put into this.

[jacquesm]

Yes. The sat people that I know in NL always show that same cradle-to-the-grave kind of thinking and it really influenced me how I'm looking at how other industries are dealing with this. It's funny because externalization is the name of the game in almost every industry and the only industry that actually goes off planet takes that 'what goes up must come down' again angle into account every step of the way.

[rjbwork]

Are there not concerns with burning up multiple agglomerations of metal, plastics, and ceramics the size of a small car in the upper atmosphere every day?

[xenadu02]

Modern end-of-life satellite designs are made to cause "rapid disassembly" very high up in the atmosphere to trigger high friction on as many individual components as possible - down to fasteners. This promotes completely re-entry burn up of everything so what reaches the surface is dust that settles back down to the surface (or ocean floor) and eventually gets compressed into rock (over millions of years). Basically back to where it came from.

Remember orbit is not like a flying airplane. Those things are going so fast friction forms a plasma that eats away at the object as it decelerates. If you can expose more surface area that effect will eat away at much more of the object. So you design it to have through-bolts or other fastener designs where the outermost portion of the fastener burns off quickly, allowing the whole assembly to rapidly disassemble and vastly increase surface area.

[CydeWeys]

The deorbits are controlled to occur over nonpopulated areas (i.e. the middle of the ocean). I don't think it amounts to much of a concern, compared to, say, the sum total emissions of all factories, power plants, ships, airplanes, and vehicles.

[zahlman]

Not to mention the temperatures they'd be burning up at. How much would survive of toxic chemicals?

[reaperducer]

The deorbits are controlled to occur over nonpopulated areas (i.e. the middle of the ocean). I don't think it amounts to much of a concern, compared to, say, the sum total emissions of all factories, power plants, ships, airplanes, and vehicles.

People used to think the oceans could just slurp up all of our garbage and plastic forever without a problem. Yet, here we are.

[brookst]

Wonder how it compares to the volume and elements of the meteorites we’re constantly hitting?

ChatGPT says we get between 50 and 100 metric tons of material a day, mostly silicates and iron/nickel metals.

[asadotzler]

Not really. What are your concerns?

[rjbwork]

Idk anything specifically but something that comes to mind is we floated CFCs into the upper atmosphere for decades before we figured out that was doing terrible things up there.

[reactordev]

Indeed, working as intended. SpaceX said at the beginning that this was how they would “clean up” older gen sats.

[gitaarik]

Is this a common approach? Seems strange this happens on such a scale now without much scrutiny.

[reactordev]

As common as Starlink is… no one has sent that many satellites into space and before they even got approval, this was discussed at length. They would fire retrograde and deorbit, burning them up in the atmospheric re-entry.

https://www.starlink.com/public-files/Starlink_Approach_to_S...

[cubefox]

> This article has a somewhat alarmist tone, but isn't this just Starlink working as intended?

The unexpected accumulation of metals in the stratosphere, discussed in the article, is clearly not intended.

> It seems much better for an old non-functional Starlink satellite to burn up in the atmosphere instead of continuing in an uncontrolled orbit. I believe most burn-ups are controlled intentional deorbits.

This is irrelevant to metals like aluminium accumulating in the stratosphere.

[Rebelgecko]

The reentry thing is more or less intentional.

There's this meme about how only recently launched starlink satellites are problematic for astronomy, but when people bring it up they usually don't mention that by virtue of the constellation's size and reentry frequency there's always going to be a bunch of recently launched satellites.