Prof. Sam LawlerMore than 7,000 Starlinks in orbit now, and they have permission for 42,000. Even conservatively, at peak operation, they'll dump 25x more aluminum into the stratosphere than falls naturally as they launch and burn up 20-25 sats PER DAY. What will that do? We actually don't know. That metal is already measurable. SpaceX is just running this experiment.
We need fewer satellites in orbit with longer operational lifetimes. THAT is the new engineering challenge in LEO.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the