If someone has the time, I'd love to see the total amount of lead added to the atmosphere by burning up satellites compared to the amount from other anthropogenic sources.

  >0.01% of anthropogenic ozone depletion

The percent increase in stratospheric AlO is still rather alarming.

Satellite reentries in 2022 (mostly pre-megaconstellation) were already raising stratospheric AlO levels by 29.5% above normal levels (with satellites adding 17 t/year), but megaconstellations could raise that to ~480% above natural levels (adding 360 t/year).

This isn't a rounding error, it's a non-trivial change in chemical composition over the entire globe, and effecting a complex and poorly-understood part of the climate system. What could go wrong?

What else might this effect beyond ozone? I guess we're gonna find out.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL10...

Low orbit is how star link is able to achieve their connections, isn't it? I think of they moved to normal telecom orbit the performance would be like normal satellite internet too

very simple explanation but there's a few issues

radio bandwidth: higher frequencies travel a shorter distance and provide more bandwidth. so you get frequency contention and also you need your sats to be physically closer

latency: the further a sat is, the higher the latency. not an issue for text messages. a huge issue for phone calls and general internet tasks. the further you "push" your sat "back", the worst the user experience is

there's other issues too, like geostationary vs geosynchronous and coverage and exposure.

WP says Low Earth Orbit is popular because it's cheap to get stuff there, the latency is low (speed of light starts to matter when you're a couple Earth diameters up) and bandwidth to the ground is high (I assume it's harder to send a signal a longer distance, even through vacuum)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit see "Use"

The reason starlink are so low in the first place is its cheaper to launch to that altitude, you need way less signal strength for devices to connect to them and the round-trip latency is vastly improved. They're intended to be essentially disposable, they're going for shorter lifetime and iterating on hardware improvements faster.

The further out you get, there's less atmospheric drag and each satellite is in view of the ground stations for longer but the cost of launch is higher and latency becomes a big issue. People expect 50ms latency for internet access not 500ms.

Not with a geostationary orbit. That must have a fixed radius. The problem is that satellites have to move to counteract the force of gravity to avoid falling out of orbit. But if they move too much or too little, then the satellite moves with respect to the earth and the orbit is no longer geostationary.

(Caveat: Not an expert by any means, just someone who had a similar question and did some reading, so my answer may well be incomplete or not fully correct.)

> For example, Starlink satellites orbit so low, that even if every single one of them collides and becomes dust, it will all decay and burn up in a matter of months, a couple years at most.

That is way too long. The threshold we are speaking of cannot allow any fragments, because they start chain reaction and destroy more satellites. And there is always one which is on the highest level. What if that gets destroyed?

> Starlink's orbits are so low that everything deorbits automatically.

It is enough if it goes one round around. They can make a cascading effect which can destroy tens of satellites at once, and few fragments are enough. And closer to earth you are, less space there is. They can't all orbit on exactly the same level. There is always one which is on slightly higher level.

Personally, I've never suffered when you've gotten punched in the nose either.

Scientific advancement has suffered from the light pollution and that advancement is a driving force behind your modern life. So you have (or will) suffer indirectly over time.

Unless you don't breathe air, you can't make the first statement with absolute certainty.

"Workin' in these coal mines ain't hurt me none no-how."

> The value to humanity of Starship succeeding at its goals is extremely high.

I beg to disagree. I see no value at all. This must be one of those accelerationist or extropianist/utilitarian beliefs.

> The value to humanity of Starship succeeding at its goals is extremely high.

Starship to orbit sounds useful, but Starship to Mars is near useless. If that's what rich people want to spend their money on, go nuts.

>The value to humanity of Starship succeeding at its goals is extremely high.

This does not benefit "humanity" at all, even if they do succeed. If a human colony on Mars is established, and all of humanity is wiped out on Earth, does it really benefit "humanity" or only the 0.000000001% of "humanity" located on Mars?

And life on Mars is going to be difficult, it isn't habitable, and is in fact quite hostile to life. I seriously doubt any colony on Mars would be viable long-term. If life on Earth is wiped out, the colony on Mars will very likely wither and die soon after without continued support from Earth.

Any colony on Mars is going to be so exponentially more fragile and fraught with problems for sustaining life, that the suggestion that it's somehow going to save humanity is ridiculous.

> The value to humanity of Starship succeeding at its goals is extremely high.

If humanity agreed with this statement, humanity would fund the program directly through investment, donations or taxes, the same way we fund roads and schools which we also value highly.

After just coming back from a trip to Maui, yeah you can totally say the same about flights to Hawaii.

We should. A global pollution tax would shake out a lot of problems.

A strong and trustworthy global democracy to enforce it, and to provide for the general welfare of everyone currently trapped in car-based cities... Is left as a simple exercise to the reader

I specifically went w/Starlink b/c the cancelation (I assume) of rural broadband initiatives and financial offsets raised the cost of rural fiber in the area of my lake home made Starlink a less expensive and significantly faster (downstream) option.

Fiber build out began three years ago and final run to home was delayed by 2y. This year they raised the cost (on an annual contract) to $85.39 for 100/100 from $39.95/month with $5/month seasonal disconnect. I can get Starlink (residential lite in my area is available) for $80/month which is supposedly limited to 120/25 but I get ~400/50 on average and is month-to-month, which saves me, being I only use the service ~6m a year.

I assume, as funding cuts continue from the federal end, this will only exacerbate the issues, in favor of wireless and/or LEO-based options--which may very well be by design.

I would like to see stats how many people got new connections via traditional infrastructure. I bet that number is much higher, probably even an order of magnitude higher.

This is HN, so I should probably look for the data my self...

EDIT:

In 2024 global internet usage grew from 5.3 billion users to 5.5 Starlink grew by a similar absolute amount, from 2 million users to 4 million over the same time period, majority of users in the USA already had access to the internet via traditional infrastructure.

I tried to find how many StarLink users got internet access (or even high speed internet access) that didn’t have one before, but I couldn’t find the numbers. Somebody could correct me, but I very much doubt that number is high enough to consider StarLink to make even a blimp in providing internet to new users.

If we wanted to subsidize internet for rural and low-income communities responsibly, we could invest in fiber and other solutions, and control the externalities (this is exactly the ReConnect program is). Starlink is not that, it is a classic case of privatizing profits by socializing hidden externalities, in this case to the entire world. Externalities in the form of pollution that will cost us all more than fiber in the long run. Funny story though, Starlink was awarded a $900M subsidy to provide rural USA internet access. In the end, that money was not given because the FCC found that Starlink "failed to demonstrate that the providers could deliver the promised service.". So no, it is not about screwing rural people, it's about not getting taken advantage of by fat cats and grifters like Elon.

Traditional infrastructure is a proven method of bringing both the availability to uderserved areas, as well as bringing the costs down for those already served.

StarLink provides a great oportunity for politicians to delay or cancel projects which would otherwise have given broadband connection to underserved areas. In urban planning this is known as the Uber effect.

Independent estimates are for $5B of profit on $10B of revenue for Starlink for 2025.

You don't get numbers like that by subsidizing it from the ~$1B/year launch business.

https://www.advanced-television.com/2025/10/01/forecast-8-2m...