SpaceX wants their Starlink constellation to crack 100,000, and there are plenty of competitors lining up who will surely want to have "the biggest and the best" at some point. None of those sats stay up terribly long, so you'll have a constant cadence of launches and reentries, both of which are a risk for their impact on the climate system, atmosphere, etc.

A largely unstudied risk, and once which will almost certainly be strenuously ignored for as long as possible.

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tekla a day ago | parent [-]

100 tons of whatever enter the Earth every single day. Are you freaking out about that?

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konmok a day ago | parent [-]

Those are rocks, which are not made from the same stuff as satellites. (Also, the article says it's 44 tons, and other sources suggest around 50 at most.) In any case, I don't think anyone here is "freaking out", I just think this issue merits investigation.

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DiggyJohnson a day ago | parent | next [-]

I’m not GP but your original comment did not come across as neutral

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kortilla a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Satellites come from rocks.

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EA-3167 a day ago | parent [-]

In the same sense that you do.

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kortilla 10 hours ago | parent [-]

No, in a much more direct sense. By the time a Starlink sat re-enters its fuel is gone so it’s mostly a pile of silicon, solar panels, lithium batteries, aluminum, etc.

The circuit boards are probably the goofiest chemical compositions but they represent a drop in the bucket mass-wise for the sats and pale in comparison to how many circuit boards get blown up every day in Iran/Ukraine/Russia.

	▲	EA-3167 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Considering that aluminum ash is the primary concern of tfa…