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by xp84 29 days ago
Whatever happens to Starlink, the debris in their new lower orbit would decay within months at the worst. It’s not one of those “thousand years imprisoned on the planet by a cloud of deadly debris” that we’ve heard about.

Not saying it couldn’t be bad if there were such a collision as obvi a really bad collision could in the short term damage Starlink and anyone else who decides to use that orbit, but this isn’t existential risk territory anymore.
2 comments
Sanzig 29 days ago
VLEO addresses the risk, sure, but the new Starcloud space datacenter hype machine isn't going VLEO, it's going 600-850 km. Those altitudes are in the years to decades range for deorbit, and SpaceX has filed for 88,000 of them.
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lstodd 29 days ago
Risk is theoretical, that is; a) never demostrated, b) most probably overblown c) any methods of mitigation were never even given a chance to develop.

All in all you people take the precautionary principle so far as to cripple your own progress in fundamental stuff like spaceflight but at the same time see no reason to apply it in social stuff like that survelliance camera affair or the net-id. And also fervently believe in modern version of snake oil that is "AI".

This is hypocrisy at the base level and a sign that we have a civilization crisis akin to one that of ~7th century AD.

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Sanzig 29 days ago
Okay buddy, that was a Gish gallop if I've ever seen one.

The risk is real. The math isn't complicated, you could stand up a basic debris simulation in a few hours with numpy from first principles. And we also know it's real because it's actually happened multiple times now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_collision

This is a real thing that satellite operators worry about all the time. Conjunction analysis and risk modeling leading to a go/no-go decision is something that real satellite operations centres do daily.

I don't know if an LVT is the answer, but we do need to figure out some way to make operators consider space sustainability efforts, especially if they are launching systems with such density that they make subsequent operation in those shells significantly riskier.

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lstodd 29 days ago
No, it is not real as in threatening anything in particular.

Some old crap got shot up. Who cares, we can launch 10x or 100x.

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hgoel 29 days ago
That attitude is how you start building up more and more debris until an orbit is basically unusable.
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lstodd 29 days ago
That attitude is how you start building up more and more tech debt until you trap yourself into extinction. If I thought that Musk's effort could benefit from an infusion of cash I would have organized it. As it happens he's limited by other things, so I sit back and enjoy the view of our civilization slowly climbing the Kardashev scale. You can fly by.
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shakna 29 days ago
If they always got the decay correct, we wouldn't have confirmed debris impact on the ground. It would be destroyed long before it reached.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/after-fiery-displa...

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BHSPitMonkey 29 days ago
That satellite's orbit very clearly did decay, though. The problem in that instance is the descent wasn't controlled, but that's a different kind of failure than the one this thread is worried about (i.e. satellites lingering for many years without active collision avoidance).
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shakna 29 days ago
Decayed without breaking down, is my point. There was a failure. Which means failure is a possibility and not something to just dismiss.
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