Half the size of a pickup truck? So like, a normal car?
this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2026
182 points (91.7% liked)
Technology
84597 readers
4000 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
More like 1/3 the size of a zambonie. Or 11/3 the size of two penguins on a foosball table.
Whats that in Rhode Islands? And how about mass, can I get that measured in bigmacs?
129 / 4.307213e+10 = 2.9949761 x 10^-9
That's in sq ft. Rounded. Length x width of a pickup truck divided by surface area of Rhode Island as reported on Wikipedia
load more comments
(1 replies)
Oh thank God... We almost had to use the metric system there didn't we?
We were within a hair's breadth of that awful fate.
Are all imperial hair bigger, or only Texas ones?
We almost had to mention standard cars, which are also half the size.
Americans don't drive cars, so they don't know how big they might be.
A car?? Is that some kind of libural version of my furd f300000 king ranch pedestrian killer edition truck?
load more comments
(3 replies)
Is the measure in Imperial pick ups,
or metric pick ups?
Cochem mentioned! 😍
Yep, they are in Low Earth Orbit. A place that has a very, very small amount of air, so the satellites experience drag, lose speed, eventually the propellant tanks run dry, and they burn up in the atmosphere. The ISS experiences the same thing, which is why its altitude slowly falls, then you see a sharp increase as they push to a slightly higher orbit.
At the altitude the SpaceX satellites are at, they only passively stay up for a few years.
How does half a pickup truck compare to a large boulder the size of a small boulder?
Large boulder is a state of mind. It achieved an awful lot that day and was feeling especially pleased with itself thus the honorific.
Please let one land on my house so I can sue SpaceX and retire early.
One fell in a farmer's field in Saskatchewan. Dude got a hassle, some publicity, and a nominal fee of a grand or something.
edit: here's a mastodon thread where astronomer Sam Lawler lives nearby and visits the site with media:
It wasn't from a starlink satellite though.
which the U.S. aerospace company SpaceX later admitted was part of a cargo trunk for its Crew Dragon spacecraft.
I don't remember that happening. I would actually be surprised if a satellite would survive reentry with basically anything left of it. If you want to return something from orbit you need heat shield or you're not getting it back.
Even the ISS is expected to completely burn up and that's much higher mass than a starlink satellite
A grand? Then I'm keeping it. I can make more as a roadside tourist attraction. Or maybe I sell it to the Chinese or Bezos or something. You want it back, Musk? Pay up, you cheap bastard!
"act of God", legalese for "fuck you".
Donnie Darko but it's Musk's space junk instead of a jet engine.
Welp, it’s been fun. Time to IPO and unload all the liabilities onto the public.
How many bananas is that?
DDG/Lucille Bluth says about 40,000-50,000 bananas.
always $ in the banana stand
Complaining about Kressler Syndrome
Complaining about Starlink
Pick one, asshole. As shitty as Musk is, Starlink is in too low of an orbit to cause Kressler Syndrome
The only worry about low earth orbit is something survives reentry enough to become a bomb. these are enough to destroy a house if that happens - my undertanding is this can't happen but if they did
Starlink satellites aren't large enough to survive the heat of reentry. A more likely concern is the various materials vaporizing and dispersing into the atmosphere, as was mentioned in the article.
That being said, calling them "heavy metals" is rather dubious. We're not talking about lead, as what most readers imagine when they hear that term. It's mainly aluminum and copper. The person interviewed is picking their words to overexaggerate their claims
load more comments
(5 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
Half the size of a pickup truck… a Mazda compact, or a jacked up GMC Hemi half ton?
Even just saying Ford F150 gives a lot of leeway.
They're about the size of a large flat screen TV. I have no idea why they reached the pickup trucks, they might have the witch but they're only a couple of inches thick. A flat screen is a much better analogy.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Where I live, we have pickup trucks half the size of pickup trucks.
There could be cubes the size of gorillas.
Is this not part of the plan. I seem to recall they are designed to entirely burn up on reentry.
Yeah this is by design. Beats the alternative of having every starlink satellite ever launched hanging around low Earth orbit long after it stops working.
Yeah
return to sender
preferably on his head
That would be so hilarious. People would be drinking beer and laughing at the story 100 years later.
Privatizing space sure did make things more efficient, puh-raise JEE-zuz-ah!
Yeah that's what happens to absolutely everything in Low Earth Orbit in just a few years. Well, unless you keep pushing them back up like we do to the International Space Station.
These satellites are doing exactly what they're intended to do. These are actually pretty small satellites overall, there are a lot up there quite a bit larger that deorbit and burn up on re-entry just fine as well.
That's part of the reason things are sent to LEO specifically, because their orbits naturally degrade and they naturally deorbit themselves without needing any assistance or fuel. It also means if a satellite in LEO fails quicker than planned, is put in an incorrect orbit due to a launch issue, or just failed prematurely, it will fail-safe and deorbit without any assistance.
view more: next ›