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by ble 22 days ago
There are safety regulations that require things roughly like, "to prevent harm to planes in the air and people on the ground, either control where your satellite re-enters so or make your satellite entirely out of components that are almost certain to burn up on re-entry".

As far as I can tell, there is no environmental regulation of how many kilograms of aluminum, silicon, etc. being added to the Earth's atmosphere when a Starlink burns up during re-entry.

cf. https://www.supercluster.com/editorial/forty-year-old-loopho... https://aas.org/about/governance/society-resolutions/atmosph...