this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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Man, you really are looking for any excuse to hate on SpaceX, right?
If you're that worried about pollution, just look up the mass of a starlink satellite vs the mass a coal plant burns every hour... Even if the satellite ends up vapourizing as 100% pollution, I'm pretty sure it's orders of magnitude below other industries like coal power or aviation.
Sure asking questions is making excuses to hate SpaceX.
Is it polluting or not? I actually expected you'd show it wasnt at all. I literally don't know either way but if you aren't comfortable explaining your position on it thats fine.
"Just asking questions"... It's just a bit suspicious that as soon as the safety aspect was proven to not be an issue, you immediately switched to another angle.
But to answer your question, yes, vapourizing someting made of metal and plastics in the upper atmosphere could certainly count as pollution, and we don't really know the effects it might have on it because no studies have yet been done.
What has been done, though, is a study of how many meteors fall on the earth every hear: early estimates in the 60s were of about 100,000 tons per year, but further studies (1) showed this was grossly underestimated and more accurate values would be about triple that.
Starlink has launched 6,054 satellites in orbit (2) that total about 3,838,042 kg or a bit below 4000 tons. Even if they all fell in the atmosphere tomorrow, it'd only amount to less than 2% of this years' "stuff" that burns up in the atmosphere (the rest coming from natural sources). Honestly I don't think that's significant, but I'll concede that we don't really know for sure. I just think that there are other more immediate, much worse sources of pollution that people should direct their anger towards.
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20110512174406/http://static.icr.org/i/pdf/technical/Moon-Dust-and-the-Age-of-the-Solar-System.pdf 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshield_launches
Noones angry here, and I have room in my brain to consider more than one thing of course. I get nothing from starlink so I'm mainly interested in the positives vs the negatives. I have heard the positive side a bunch, not the negative side. I do wish the answer was a bit more than "we don't know yet", but I'm not going to say that starlink shouldnt exist.
I've personally been a Starlink subscriber for about a year while I was traveling, and it really was a game-changer. Rock-solid internet in remote places, fast enough to have Zoom calls on, all for a price that's only about twice what I currently pay now that I'm back home (people complaining about Starlink's price don't know what they're talking about, this is 100+ Mbps statellite internet we're talking about. Other options are ten times the cost for less than a tenth of the speed).
It just drives me nuts when I see progress being blocked for stupid reasons. Examples in other areas would be wind power ("but what about the birds"), electric cars ("but cobalt = slave labour", "akschually, when you charge the car with the dirtiest fuel possible and take into account all externalities it's less green than just the tailpipes of a gas car"), space exploration ("the potable water sprayed on the launch pad leaked into the environment, here's a fine"). There's some stuff that's been disproved years ago by anyone with half a brain that keeps being repeated, it's infuriating.
Okay and what about how you use starlink is a benefit for society? I understand it benefits you personally.
What are you hoping starlink is going to help us progress towards?
Connecting more people to the Internet, giving more options in rural areas.