Prof. Sam Lawler
Ok, time for a thread on what I've been getting lots of interviews about. I've dropped some hints and shared some info, but here's the story!
Remember this document I posted a while ago? https://www.starlink.com/public-files/Starlink_Approach_to_Satellite_Demisability.pdf
It casually mentions that a piece of a Starlink satellite was found in Saskatchewan in August 2024.
Prof. Sam Lawler
The fact that Saskatchewan farmers have now found multiple pieces of space debris from 2 different spacecraft in the easiest, most likely place in the world to find it, tells me that there is space debris falling on us terrifyingly often.
Don't lose sleep over this - your individual odds of getting hit by space debris are still basically zero, but the odds of someone, somewhere in the world getting hit, are rising rapidly. And this is totally avoidable!
Prof. Sam Lawler
Much more worrying: this shows how many pieces of space junk there must be on the ground already. If we've found debris from 2 different spacecraft that fell within 6 months in the easiest place in the world to find it, imagine how much more is in the mountains of BC or the woods of Ontario/Quebec (or other places around the world), where it will never be found.
What weird new kinds of pollution is that adding to whatever environment those fall on?
Prof. Sam Lawler
I saw a chance and took it: I was on the Sask-wide non-CBC local talk radio station talking about Saturn's new moons, and I created a burner email (thanks to suggestions from you all) and asked listeners to write to me if they had info. And because Saskatchewan is apparently one gigantic small town, IT WORKED!!
By the weekend, I had the phone number of the farmer who found the Starlink piece, and I got to chat with him.
Prof. Sam Lawler
The debris he found in his lentil field is not huge, only about laptop-sized. But there are more than 7,000 Starlink satellites orbiting above us right now!
So, now I have seen two different SpaceX spacecraft that are designed to be "fully demisable" that dropped debris on the ground, in my home province. The document says this Starlink debris is a one-off because of a faulty deployment, but I would really like to see some hard proof of that.
Prof. Sam Lawler
Jonathan McDowell originally sent me this literally 4 days after he was on-air with me for the 1 year anniversary of the Crew Dragon Trunk falling on Saskatchewan. After that radio show https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-189-blue-sky/clip/16130106-how-space-junk-impact-saskatchewan-is-outer-space, I sent him a note saying "Thanks for joining in! Hopefully no more space junk falls here, so we'll never have to do this again."
Clearly, this is all my fault.
Prof. Sam Lawler
When I first saw the official document, I was 75% sure it was some kind of AI gobbledygook, or a copy-paste error, since the Crew Dragon Trunk fell on Saskatchewan in Feb, was discovered in April, and was picked up by SpaceX in June (I wrote lots about that here previously).
But then it was confirmed by a reliable source! SpaceX really did get a piece of a Starlink satellite from Saskatchewan.
SpaceX dropped multiple pieces of space debris from 2 different spacecraft on Saskatchewan in 2024!
Prof. Sam Lawler
Why Saskatchewan? As I posted earlier:
1. Most of the land is southern Sask is flat, large monoculture farms, that large machines completely denude at least once a year. It's the ideal place to find space debris.
2. Due to the orbits that have been chosen, we're under the densest band of satellites that has ever existed.
Prof. Sam Lawler
So, at this point I knew it was real, and I knew it fell in Saskatchewan somewhere, but I didn't know where. Jonathan McDowell had a prediction based on the last known orbit of the failed Starlink launch (mentioned in the document). But...that's a really big area.
How could I find out where it fell? I was hoping a journalist would do the investigation for me. But nobody was picking it up for investigation. I realized I probably have the best odds of finding it.
Prof. Sam Lawler
I should add there are also big geopolitical implications to an American company being able to dump potentially lethal debris on Canada (and other countries) with no apparent consequence, but that's a whole other thread (that I've written before) and I need to go check for baby goats again.
Prof. Sam Lawler
Oh hey look: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/2nd-piece-of-space-junk-landed-on-saskatchewan-farmland-in-2024-1.7502192
Prof. Sam Lawler
The solution to this problem of space debris hitting the ground is not "we'll get better at ablation and demisability" which is what the sat companies are trying to do. The atmospheric pollution from tens of thousands of satellites turning into metal vapour in the stratosphere is terrifying.
The solution is fewer satellites with longer operational lifetimes!
There's your engineering challenge: go!
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