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SpaceX vaporizes 260 Starlink satellites in six months using Earth's atmosphere
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2026
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Technology
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So that's 148,980 to 325,000 kilograms of electronics burned. Literally hundreds of tons of e-waste being incinerated by single corporation in just half a year.
They've also been shown to have a not insignificant impact on the ozone. We're so fucked
Does puncturing through our upper atmosphere during escape have any non insignificant effects? I've seen some of those videos of launches at night (when the solar wind lights up everything) and it sure looks like we are burning holes in our ozone layer when we do that. Just asking you cause you seem somewhat knowledgeable.
Okay so I'm just into chemistry and astronomy as a hobby because I love learning, no expert. My understanding though.
The launches definitely aren't great but they're actually not the biggest issue. The problem is the satellites, when they're deorbited, generate 50+ lbs of aluminum oxide which just floats on the upper atmosphere for years (like 30 years). Aluminum oxide is an especially potent catalyst for ozone depletion. The mega constellations that Musk wants would require multiple satellites to be deorbited daily, quickly piling up the aluminum oxide. The low orbit internet satellites are relatively short lived. So he wants either Kessler syndrome or enough aluminum oxide to eat the ozone in a year
That's a lot of electronics waste. Estimates for 2025 e-waste into landfills was around 65 million tons, and it continues to rise each year. It's not an either/or, we can complain about both, but the scale difference makes the first seem a bit less dramatic. We should do something about our throwaway society.
Hundreds of tons of random natural space dust hit the atmosphere daily
Space dust has a different composition to artificial satellites however
Are you sure bout that?
Yeah. Look it up.
Not just incinerated, incinerate red in the upper atmosphere while directly heating it.
They burn up from friction, it's not just the flames the whole process is heating the planet and who knows how many things it's fucking up we haven't noticed before.
But the most important bit is if they don't know how to get them down, they need to stop sending them up. It's not rocket appliances
There’s no way burning satellites are putting enough energy into the atmosphere to heat it up. They cause other problems like ozone degradation and serious aerosol pollution.
Rockets on the other hand put a lot of greenhouse gasses high up in the atmosphere, including incredibly potent greenhouse gasses like water vapor. These launches account for a meaningful percentage of all emissions.
You're not crashing the entire rocket, just a tiny bit of it. Also, generating direct energy has never been a climate change issue, it's the byproducts of that generating that are fucking us up.
I mean from a conservation of energy perspective and just calculating a maximum potential energy
As I said, only the energy of the satellite, not the entire rocket, which is a miniscule fraction of the energy the launch used.
Also pointing out that it really doesn't matter, in terms of energy, potential or otherwise. It's only the physical byproducts that can have any major impact.