Abstract from the paper in the article:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL109280
Large constellations of small satellites will significantly increase the number of objects orbiting the Earth. Satellites burn up at the end of service life during reentry, generating aluminum oxides as the main byproduct. These are known catalysts for chlorine activation that depletes ozone in the stratosphere. We present the first atomic-scale molecular dynamics simulation study to resolve the oxidation process of the satellite’s aluminum structure during mesospheric reentry, and investigate the ozone depletion potential from aluminum oxides. We find that the demise of a typical 250-kg satellite can generate around 30 kg of aluminum oxide nanoparticles, which may endure for decades in the atmosphere. Aluminum oxide compounds generated by the entire population of satellites reentering the atmosphere in 2022 are estimated at around 17 metric tons. Reentry scenarios involving mega-constellations point to over 360 metric tons of aluminum oxide compounds per year, which can lead to significant ozone depletion.
PS: wooden satellites can help mitigate this https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01456-z
burned wood in the upper atmosphere also catalyzes ozone depletion That’s why it was bad putting CFCs up there in the first place, almost everything catalyzes these reactions
Oh, so no Chlorine ever truly gets locked away from the ozone cycle…smoke particles will just keep reactivating it 😞
I thought that the idea was to stop crashing old satellites into earth and instead require they maintain enough propellent to move themselves off into a graveyard orbit.
That works for satellites in a Geostationary orbit, but Starlink satellites are in a Low Earth Orbit (LEO). While LEO is in space there are a tiny amount of atmospheric particles there which creates a tiny amount of drag. Things in LEO will come back down eventually.
Starlink and SpaceX should have never existed. Period.
Idk, i think SpaceX is catching a lot of heat just because they have musk “at the helm”. He doesnt even do anything there, he isnt an aerospace engineer. They just let him sit in mission control so he can feel special. The actual work spacex is doing is revolutionary. Reuseable rockets are a seriously groundbreaking development. Almost everything you do these days relies on a sattelite connection, so doing that cheaper, more reliably, and less wastefully is massive.
Starlink is a different matter tho, its just another ISP but with a fancy connection method.
I think starlink is more than that as even more things rely on a (good) Internet connection ingeneral than rely on satellites, and traditional connectivity methods leave many people underserved even in countries like America let alone the world.
It definitely has its problems, if nothing else that it’s privately owned and anyone who wanted to compete would then massively amplify those problems.
Almost everything you do these days relies on a sattelite connection
Except GPS and satellite TV, say what now?
My internet doesn’t rely on satellite, neither does basically anything else
Can you imagine the world without GPS at this point?
In any case since you asked the biggest things besides those are weather predictions, spying, part of the large region emergency response systems, research, and land management.
Fair enough.
SpaceX and the reusable Falcon 9 is incredibly incredible. It has already eliminated lots of waste in the field of space travel.
Be nice if you could go into a bit more detail about your thoughts on this. Rather than just asserting your conclusions.
space should not be commercialised.
Ok congrats on successfully moving the problem backwards. You have made another assertion without evidence to backup your previous assertion without evidence.
I understand your opinion but it is just an opinion
Starlink shouldn’t have existed. SpaceX should have been a division of NASA
spacex shouldn’t have existed; nasa is fine.
all spacex has done is open up the wallet and pay for endless rockets to be exploded.
That’s never going to happen. Both Democrats and Republicans abuse NASA and take money from it. Because the public doesn’t care or understand the importance of space travel. Your comments are a prime example of misinformation about space capabilities that NASA has. Without SpaceX, we would still be sucking Russia off to launch on the ISS. Spacex doesn’t give a fuck about politicians and just does what they want. That might be bad one day, but today it’s fucking great, and anyone saying otherwise is either misinformed or intentionally misleading
NASA has blown up their fair share of rockets in their day. A couple of shuttles as well. I’m saying that all the people working at SpaceX would have been better employed as NASA employees so their research isn’t payealled.
Yes it went so well with innovation from NASA’s existing practice.
At least they’re not blowing their budget exploding rockets…
I am pretty sure they are making lots of money. You know based on the little bit of financial information leaking out.
Lots of people are experts on this topic it seems. They should form their own launch provider and show how it is done. Because results generally speak for themselves. They went from nothing to controlling over half the launches of the human race as a whole in about a decade. Did they get government money? Oh you betcha. Did they get as much as their rivals did? Not even close.
Reusability makes sense, this technique of rapid trial and error also makes sense.
No they’re somehow managing to blow it neither launching nor exploding rockets.
And the lesson is that they probably should’ve blown up more rockets on purpose rather than lose them on accident.
The Falcon 9 has the largest number of successful launches of any rocket ever by a large margin.
on purpose
lol
I mean you can giggle at the turn of phrase, but clearly what is meant is to be more willing to tolerate risk. Very clearly that’s been a much shorter path to success than the one NASA took.
You can be more direct with it. Going out and doing something you know will fail is failing on purpose. SpaceX fails on purpose sometimes. They don’t just tolerate the risk of it; they set up cameras and other sensors and push their systems to failure on purpose.
the problem is republicans not nasa
That might be true. But every organisation has to achieve its goals in the context that it exists. And to be fair to NASA they’ve realised it’s better to outsource development because it’s less prone to porn barrel politics.
“Porn barrel politics” I’m intrigued.
Wow 🤣 I am not sure what happened there.
I’m also intrigued. Clearly things are more exciting at NASA than I thought.
If the Russians had not been rude to Musk, and hurt his little ego, SpaceX wouldn’t exist.
I guess we blame the Russians for this too then.
Why?
“I know nothing about SpaceX or Starlink and don’t care to learn. All I want is to make sure everyone knows about the massive hate boner I have for Elon Musk” -Katy
The roughly 10-centimetre-long cube is made of magnolia-wood panels and has an aluminium frame, solar panels, circuit boards and sensors. The panels incorporate Japanese wood-joinery methods that do not rely on glue or metal fittings.
When LignoSat plunges back to Earth, after six months to a year of service, the magnolia will incinerate completely and release only water vapour and carbon dioxide
Huh? I’m confused.
heh, yea, the satellites are not just wood for sure, they goofed. But it’s less metals, which helps.
The article linked at he bottom has a picture and more info on the wooden satellites.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/japanese-scientists-wooden-satellite
uh. that article has less information? Unless you’re seeing something I don’t. My comment literally has more information about the satellite than the futurism article.
Your quote is not from the OP article, or maybe it’s been changed.
Before anyone jumps on the Anti-Musk train, read the article, please. They admit that they don’t understand the complications that could arise and that they don’t have any hard figures for the damage being caused. I’ll be the first to jump in and say that it’s probably a bad thing to just let metals burn in in atmo, but let’s make sure we discuss the facts, and not just the politics of the potential polluter.
Ah yes, the usual method of waiting until the issue becomes confirmed and also way too severe to fix instead of acting on precaution and harming profits of private companies. What could go wrong?
As opposed to acting before you understand the effects of your actions? Neither seem like good choices.
Probably the best option would be to research harder. Make the polluter fund a much larger scale research program to understand the problem and viable solutions as quickly as possible.
There is a line somewhere I think. Like people weren’t 100% sure the atomic bomb won’t ignite the atmosphere (it’s only very unlikely), but they still tested it. Similarly the probability of creating micro blackholes at LHC is not zero either, yet they still ran it.
If we have to make sure everything is 100% safe before we can do anything, we will be stuck with the status quo.
We will die of starvation because nothing is 100% safe, so waiting until we find that level of safety means we just won’t do anything.
Nah, this is a different method. It’s the one where we get all of the facts before we take action. Maybe you aren’t up on it, but knee-jerk is so 1700s.
We don’t have to wait until it’s “fully confirmed” to start being concerned about it. Remember climate change denial? We were in the “we don’t know if humans are causing it” phase for a while.
I also agree, let’s not jump on the anti-Musk team for this, but satellites burning up has always been a rather obvious source of pollution, and it’s good to see more discussion on it
We were in the “we don’t know if we’re causing it” phase for a long time because big oil knew about global warming and deliberately ran disinformation campaigns so they could keep profiteering. Had Exxon done the right thing in the 70s we wouldn’t have this looming crisis.
And now we’re in the “is burning up thousands of satellites bad?” phase of space exploration. I’ll be waiting for spacex to do the right thing.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not defending corporations here. I’m simply stating the fact that climate change denial wasn’t the case of waiting until it’s “fully confirmed”, it was pretty much confirmed back in the 70s. They even had predictions for the next century on how things will go bad if nothing is done and the last time I checked we were pretty on course with their predictions. When it came to the scientific consensus, it was pretty much “fully confirmed”. It was simply the public opinion where it wasn’t “fully confirmed” because corporations deliberately ran disinformation to make it seem like scientists didn’t know what they were talking about.
But this paper isn’t really confirming anything. The paper itself says that the model does not account for all the factors and to literally quote the paper:
As reentry rates increase, it is crucial to further explore the concerns highlighted in this study.
This paper is not presenting a final conclusion, it’s presenting concerns that need further studies. let’s wait for further studies and if there’s scientific consensus about it being an issue I’m all for bringing out the pitchforks. In the mean let’s keep calm and dread over the doom and gloom that is climate change.
It’s highlighting a potential significant risk. Major ozone loss is much worse than lack of internet. The high uncertainty of the paper is easily offset by the harm that would be caused if the paper is correct.
So you’re saying that in the 70s they had predictions about how things will go bad for the next century?
Where are these predictions? It’s been 50 years so at least some of these predictions should be checkable now.
I would feel so much better if I could see some examples of climate science predictions being proven accurate.
Yeah, and now despite what the scientists say, everyone believes climate change is going to render Earth uninhabitable, and we are taking massive steps to avoid the problem as if it were an existential threat, which the science again does not support.
We’re treating climate change as if it were as serious as a planet killer asteroid, and we’re massively violating people’s rights as if it were.
Sure, PFAS were also considered a nonsignificant issue until they weren’t, only it’s too late to unfuck it now. Well, no harm in generating more potential ticking time bombs I guess.
Like maybe wait a few year and finance some science to check that your mega constellation of satellites (built to fail after only a few years to make sure your rocket company never goes out of work) won’t be a fucking nuisance on so many levels before you actually launch them ?
This “get all the facts before taking action” ?Oh, you mean a study on the Satellite Internet Constellations that have been in orbit since the 1990s, a full 30 years before Starlink launched? As with nearly everything else, Musk isn’t the first to do whatever he does, he’s just the loudest. If Starlink hadn’t launched we would still be facing the same problems. Thankfully, he’s a big enough ass that he makes a easy target for these kinds of things.
Maybe I didn’t get my facts straight, but iirc there are around 7.5k satellites up there, with starlink current count about 5.5k. And I think I read they got the greenlight for the 7.5k gen 2 sats launches.
That looks like a scale change to me. Associated with the short lifespan (which contrasts with the situation 30 years ago, where launches were more expensive), it’s kind of a new situation and should have warranted a more careful approach.So musk isn’t the first one to launch satellites, I agree. But the way it’s done is kinda new, and mostly on the worse side. And I’m not saying the old way was good, and not absolving previous actors from responsability in the pollution.
Ah yes, the usual method of waiting until the issue becomes confirmed and also way too severe to fix instead of acting on precaution and harming profits of private companies.
No, but as even them don’t understand what the complications are and how much the damages could be, maybe to wait to have at least some hard number looks like a good idea.
What could go wrong?
And what could go wrong if we start to fight a problem that we don’t understand how big it is, maybe using the wrong solution on a wrong scale ?
Perfect is the enemy of good.
If it is worth doing, it is worth getting it done, even if we aren’t 100% certain or ready on a lot of things. Doctors don’t wait for the worst before starting treatment. Specially if corrections carry none or way less risks than what is currently being done.
One of the big risks of not having a global communications satellite network is that people can get cut off from the internet by land-based ISPs loyal to whatever local government they’re trying to be free of.
So there’s a danger of just saying “no satellite clusters”.
We’re always balancing dangers against other dangers. There’s danger in not acting, not growing too.
Doing scientific experiments to understand the risks is worth doing.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
I agree on this.
If it is worth doing, it is worth getting it done, even if we aren’t 100% certain or ready on a lot of things.
From the article it seems we are not even 10% certain. In summary, we don’t understand (yet) the problem, we have no clue on how complex is, we have no hard number to tell us how big it is.
I agree, something need to be done. But for now the “something” is just to try to understand better the problem, or at least how big it is.Doctors don’t wait for the worst before starting treatment.
True, but they start treatment when they know what they need to cure or at least they have solid evidence that indicate something, not before.
Specially if corrections carry none or way less risks than what is currently being done.
Hard to decide that corrections carry lower risks of something we don’t understand.
maybe to wait to have at least some hard number looks like a good idea.
Good plan. So they’re holding off on starlink launches to let the science catch up, right?
Yeah, PFAS comes to mind. It took decades to confirm it’s harmful to humans but at this point it is everywhere and hard to get rid of. Worst part is they try to use other chemicals to replace PFAS, but again how harmful they are we don’t know and we will learn that decades later too because companies don’t want to make long term research before releasing the product. Enviroment shouldn’t be a billionaire’s testing ground.
I was actually reviewing the O3 depletion process https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_monoxide and Cl only stops reacting with O3 when it ends up as ClO2, but that is rare, because ClO usually is too short-lived to react with another Cl into Cl2O, so it may be possible that a catalyst like Al2O3 could actually clean up Cl interfering with the ozone layer along with the effect of speeding up the nefarious reaction with O3 :D
The irony of a wikipedia expert agreeing with a tabloid skeptic.
Why did you write that? What do you gain or anyone reading from that comment?
I wanted to reinforce good behavior, punish bad behavior.
Nah man, that’s just toxic. Let people brainstorm and just let go of the hammer.
Sure I admit that your mistakes were purely imaginary and we can all pretend you never made them to hide your shame.
You didn’t mention any mistakes though
Guys, let’s not jump into conclusions. I’d say that it is not a real issue until at least a billion people have died from it.
If they don’t have grounds to accuse SpaceX then SpaceX can sue them for defamation. SpaceX doesn’t need YOU to defend them.
OP listed the referenced study in the description, it has “hard numbers” from simulations and citations to many other studies as well.
Another thing Elon is screwing up on
It’s like he became the opposite of King Midas.
I don’t know, maybe it is like Midas. The things he touches turn into something coveted, and therefore valuable, but also of little to no practical use, just like gold.
At least the article came with the numbers. Given what I regularly read about all the pollutants we daily pump into the atmosphere, the numbers in this article for the materials being atomized is…well, they’re very small in scale.
Basically, if a few hundred tons per year is hurting the ozone (and other things), just imagine what the billions of tons per year of emissions does.
The point here is not that aluminum oxide “pollutes” on its own, it is that it “speeds up” the harmful reaction between ozone and any chlorine (like CFC) “pollutants” up there without being consumed, so it keeps acting over 30 years. It makes all the pollutants you mention “more effective”.
I didn’t see a mention in the paper on what amount the bump up would be with the maximum amount of AlO2 distributed in the layers of the atmosphere where the reactions would occur. When emissions are in the trillions of tons, I wonder if it would even be measurable.
When emissions are in the trillions of tons, I wonder if it would even be measurable.
emission of what? There aren’t trillions of tons of Chlorine in the stratosphere (that’s what interferes with O3) being pumped into the atmosphere. Are you thinking of CO2?
I doubt anybody can give a confident answer today about the value of the effect that a kg of Al2O3 can have per ton of atmosphere at ozone layer height, because that would involve not just doing what they did in the paper, but also figuring out what “shape” the Al2O3 particles have to know what their adsorption surface would be, for e.g. zeolites this can be 16m2 per gram. e.g. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/earth-extraterrestrial-space-dust-weight-meteorite but maybe it can be simply extrapolated from analogous metallic meteorite dust samples :/
Carbon monoxide also contribute to ozone breakdown, and there are additional manmade substances similar to CFCs with chlorine and bromine that are still leaked. Environmental changes in the Antarctic also can increase ozone depletion as well as longer lasting cold air in the stratosphere (observed in 2020 in the Arctic). The mention of emissions was just to suggest that smaller reactions can get lost in all the other problems we have created, although wildfire increases are raising CO.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
While researchers have largely focused on the pollutants being released by rockets as they launch, we’ve only begun to understand the implications of having thousands of retired and malfunctioning satellites burn up in the atmosphere.
“Only in recent years have people started to think this might become a problem,” said coauthor and University of Southern California astronautics researcher Joseph Wang in a statement.
Since it’s practically impossible to get accurate readings from the kind of pollutants satellites release as they scream back through the atmosphere, scientists can only estimate their effects on the surrounding environment.
By studying how common metals used in the construction of satellites interact with each other, the team estimated that the presence of aluminum increased in the atmosphere by almost 30 percent in 2022 alone.
They found that a 550-pound satellite generates roughly 66 pounds of aluminum oxide nanoparticles during reentry, which would take up to 30 years to drift down into the stratosphere.
“The environmental impacts from the reentry of satellites are currently poorly understood,” the researchers note in their paper.
The original article contains 371 words, the summary contains 176 words. Saved 53%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
So they take 17 tons of emissions, which are basically nothing on an atmospheric scale, then extrapolate that to 360 and start freaking out. Peak quality journalism.
its not a jurnalist coming up with this its from a paper. And as far as i understand they took information on satelite mass increasefrom another paper which had a “a comprehensive body of data”(https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020AGUFMGC0420004H)
SpaceX has been receptive to design changes to starlink in the past to minimize impact, like decreasing reflectivity and reflection angles for astronomers. They might be receptive to moving to different alloy for the body construction.
Magnesium comes to mind that would be light be expensive. Steel alloys might be cheap and heavy options for later when starship is operational. Would those have similar effects on ozone, or is it only the aluminum oxides?
I feel like it shouldn’t even have to be said out loud that gravity and weight correlate, but their orbit would be heavily impacted by replacing aluminium with five times as much steel for the same durability. You might be able to get away with slightly less if you consider the steel has more heat resistance, but idk.
Yeah you’d need to put up fewer sats per launch. But they might still have enough lift capacity on starship to do that.
Weight does not affect orbit. It affects the amount of fuel needed to reach orbit, and therefore cost, but not the orbit itself.
Exactly, it needs a higher angular momentum at the same altitude.
When there’s drag involved it’s different, but in vacuum there’s no relationship between weight and orbit.
Are you referring to the effects of upper atmospheric drag on the orbital maintenance requirements?
Magnesium oxides can also serve as a catalyst for lots of reactions, but I’m not sure if it will have the same effect in this specific context, I’d guess it would.
That’s why I added the link to the wooden satallites, that also reduces the metal debris somewhat and reduces other effects like radio interference.
Wood is interesting, but the article doesn’t address off gassing at all, which is a huge problem for communication satellites. Is there a way to keep the wood from off gassing? For 3d prints in vacuum, they metal coat them to keep the gas inside. Or maybe you could resin soak them? With hopefully an extremely UV stable resin. But I didn’t know what the weight trade looks like then, resin is heavy.
But if you’re looking composites anyway, carbon fiber would be another great option. Lightweight but with a few manufacturing constraints. But should burn up to carbon dioxide on reentry.
I just read an interesting research article from NASA that shows that carbon fiber survives reentry better than our previous scientific consensus claimed.
Some carbon fiber will burn up into carbon dioxide, but a good chink of it will surprisingly survive reentry conditions. I think you are very right that it should be a better material to use for starlink.
Thanks Elon
You would think space engineers would‘ve run those numbers before sending tens of thousands of them in orbit. It‘s really annoying that we can only hope for the best at this point.
Why would you think that?
When I fire up the grill, I don’t do calculations on how much weight in CO2 I’m putting into the air and then extrapolate that to find the total mass of CO2 that grills generate globally. I usually just make burgers.
That space engineer made sure that they were on the right side of the rocket equation and they made it to orbit (which is hard on its own).
I agree that thorough environmental studies really ought to be happening, but I’m not surprised that aspects got missed.
I fully expect they did. I think this is partly why Elon went from “there’s no planet B” to a Saudi simp. Way to much money to be made to waste time on the concerns of scientists and the welfare of the planet.
They do, and did. Perhaps this reaction with the ozone layer just hasn’t been considered until now.
I was just worried about Kessler syndrome and just felt relaxed that their orbits were low enough to naturally decay and never become a permanent problem. What this research seems to show is that the aluminum oxide dust does not settle in days/weeks, but it is fine enough to stay there for decades :/
Buy a ticket to mars. Problem solved.
Quite possible. Let’s fix our ISPs so that all of humanity has access to bandwidth priced to a value that they can afford for their area. A huge project that means lots of union jobs and an economic payoff for decades. If we pull this off Starlink won’t have any customers except very marginal cases.
Fix the problem directly instead of fixing the solution unintended side effects
Gee, where are the boatload of billions that the US congress passed for nationwide broadband?
Fucking ripoff telecon companies.
I thought that program was ended in 2018?
I got fiber in the middle of nowhere from it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Whereas we are smack dab in the middle of cities, but just far enough out of reach to be stuck with 20Mb DSL that will never improve.
I’m a 7 minute drive from downtown and my options are satellite, cellular, or fixed wireless. Everyone around me has gigabit ethernet, but due to costs involved in running fiber and the fact my little community is mostly old folks (and thus likely not going to buy in) ISPs don’t want to “invest” in us.
They should just pay people to lay the cable directly instead of awarding it programmatically to companies.
That’s what my city is basically doing. They’re contracting with a local installer to lay cable, then selling service on that network. No money is being awarded, in fact the contract states that they get paid with part of the subscription fee, so they are motivated to get people connected quickly so they can start collecting. The city owns the network and ISPs compete over customers on that network. They claim it’ll take 2 years for everyone to be connected, which is pretty quick (but the proof is in the pudding).
Seems like a decent system to me. We’re being promised 10gbps available, but pricing details aren’t finalized yet (and my router only handles 1gbps anyway, and I’m too lazy and cheap to upgrade everything).
AFAIK, this plan was in the works before the infrastructure bill was passed, so I don’t think we’re taking money from that, but I could be wrong.
Why not both? I kinda want Starlink for road trips and camping. As in, pull into a national park, set up camp, do normal Internet things, then go hike the park the next day or whatever. I could even work from a national park if I really wanted to, which would be really cool.
ah but it helps Elon make money (maybe?) and Elon knows what is best for us, so that is fine
futurism article… seriously?
There was the scientific article and the abstract in the body of the post if you wanted to read it, wtf more do you want?
