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
So… Let me get this straight… The satellites burning up are essentially creating aluminum chemtrails that my mother-in-law keeps going on about?
Aluminum is neurotoxic so yes
Well yeah ever since you guys forced us to stop doing the airplane chemtrails, we’ve been out of business.
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?
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.
I don’t know how that is usual in your mind. Since from my perspective I see it constantly.
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.
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.
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.
Can’t tell if this is sarcasm, orr
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 years 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” ?Edit: I think I knee-jerked
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.
“All the facts” is counterfactual, superstitious thinking. There is no such thing as “all the facts”, except in game theory examples like tic-tac-toe.
In all realms other than small mathematical models, there’s no circumstance under which one has all the facts.
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
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.
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?
damn, starlink is my only way to access the internet. I wish there were an alternative that’s usable. Traditional access providers don’t work and cell data is extremely slow and there’s no coverage where I live. I pay for Starlink with a bitter taste
Might I enquire as to where this remote location might be?
Like on a general basis, no need for addresses.
As a Finn I’m forever spoiled in terms of wireless coverage. We got tons of solitary forests. But you can get an internet connection in literally all of them.
97% of the country gets 4g. And not of the people. The country.
I live in rural California. We only just this year are able to pick up a faint LTE signal. I think it might get us a very unstable 1-2 Mbps if we hold the phone just right. We have no cable, DSL or other land-based options and because of the topography can’t pick up the local wireless provider, which is very expensive anyway - like $175/month for 50/5
So without Starlink our only options are crappy regular satellite providers like Hughesnet which impose very low quotas - 10 GB monthly for day time usage - and have insane latency.
It bugs the shit out of me I have to give money to that fuckwit but without it we live in the dark ages.
We’re in Mayotte. Two undersea cables connect us to nearby continents (cf submarinecablemap.com) but they’re down most of the time. We haven’t had a connection in the last six months so we finally subbed to Starlink. Well, strictly speaking there was a connection but it would take anywhere between 5mn to 15mn to load the text of a static webpage, no images or anything else… forget about sending data, using forums… I had to get out and walk uphill for a minute or two to use my phone’s cell data
My family has Starlink, they live in mountainous rural. Cell towers aren’t too far away, but mountains get in the way of decent signal. No one is running any cables their way, despite a local telco taking money explicitly for providing internet service.
We Finns don’t have any of those pesky mountains.
At least one hour outside any Midwest city.
Rural US most likely. Place is too big, too few people to be worth for comoanies to invest. So many places only have 1-2 providers at best, afaik.
What about the remaining 3%?
Also, to (hopefully) answer your question:
Ignore Finland/Europe for a second and look at North America. The US has many population centers along the coasts and very few in the west inland. People still live there, so they need internet access, but oftentimes there aren’t enough people to justify expanding coverage across such a huge area without subsidizing said coverage with government funds or other customers, so there are bound to be coverage gaps if you don’t have unlimited money to throw at the problem. If you take a look at Canada, you can see how much worse the problem is as they have even more area to cover, and it reflects in the fact that they have some of the highest wireless prices in the world.
Also remember that these are wealthy countries. Plenty of other regions have the same problems with population density and physical size, and they can’t throw money at the problem like we can.
The TL;DR is that these deadzones exist in a ton of places because a lot of low-population areas are physically huge.
I remind you that it’s the remaining 3% of the country, physically. It’s not 3% of the population. It’s just some places in Lapland which don’t have the greatest coverage. And the 97% figure is 4g, 3g has better coverage.
The Northern part of Finland is very sparsely populated and people like internet and cables are very labour-intensive compared to setting up mobile network towers.
But yeah, compared to the US, we’re not really that sizable. We’re like the size of Montana or so, and they’ve around a fifth of our population.
tldr Yeah, it is about the size, but also, with Nokia and so on, we’ve sort of quite a lot of good know-how on building wireless networks. We’re the most sparsely populated country in the EU, but I think there’s quite a lot of Spain where there’s much worse coverage.
lol that’s fantastic. Out in the forest with internet. How come, cell towers are closely packed ?
~75% of the country is forest, so it’s kinda hard to not be in a forest.
Idk if they’re closely packed.
Coverage map.
I love it when ppl from small countries don’t get why there isn’t wifi / cell coverage literally everywhere…
I think they’re aware, given they said they’re spoiled?
Finland is not a small country compared to its population density and distribution.
Finland has 18 inhabitants per km².
USA have 35 inhabitants per km².
Huh. TIL.
But these are sort of not that good indicators, because the US has huge population centers on the coasts, and nothing in the vast center.
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 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 :/
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 😞
Thanks Elon
I hate Elon, but he ain’t the only one trashing the LEO
Okay, but he’s trashing it the fastest and for the dumbest reasons.
If I have to compare, giving people in underserved areas access to the Internet is a better reason than spy sats or satellite TV.
One thing to note - The science is still calculating. Yet. SpaceX (and presumably others) are allowed to continue and increase what they’re doing. This is the bass ackwards way to protect future us.
Its the same mentality as driving in a random direction for 20 minutes while someone looks in the car for the map on the off chance that when you get the map open you’ll be where you wanted to be anyway.
It has the potential (and at this point, just the potential) for planet level changes, and is being done by one group. Should I, a random dude, be able to do something that might possibly affect the entire planet, and the planet as a whole just have to wait and see how it turns out?
The hopeful thought that its probably nothing, before anyone can prove that it’s probably nothing, makes a bet where the short term wins are mine, but any long term losses are everyone else’s.
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.
ah but it helps Elon make money (maybe?) and Elon knows what is best for us, so that is fine
Its good to keep an eye out for new sources of pollution, but the possible ozone depletion from satellites burning up is a tiny tiny fraction of what we’re doing on Earth right now for pollutants.
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Buy a ticket to mars. Problem solved.
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?
