Feb. 5, 2025 (Spaceweather.com): What goes up, must come down–which could be a problem when you’re launching thousands of satellites. Since 2018, SpaceX has placed more than 7,000 Starl…
Kessler syndrome is only a big problem for higher orbits where air drag is miniscule. Low-earth orbit refers to a rather large band of space below an altitude of 2,000 km. Objects at the upper end would be much more problematic than at the lower end, since atmospheric density falls off nearly exponentially with altitude.
SpaceX actually says that StarLink is deployed at 550km, much lower than normal.[1] While this is to decrease latency, it also means their satellites will naturally fall out of the sky in 5 years without periodic boosting of altitude.
Even if Kessler happened at their altitude, we could all just wait a few years for the trash to fall out of the sky. In fact, the more
everything smashes together into tiny pieces in said orbit, the faster the problem would solve itself after since as objects get smaller, their surface area to volume ratio increases, which means drag would affect them more per their mass.
What is the probability that this nonsense will eventually cause a Kessler syndrome? Or does that only happen in higher orbits with less drag?
Kessler syndrome is only a big problem for higher orbits where air drag is miniscule. Low-earth orbit refers to a rather large band of space below an altitude of 2,000 km. Objects at the upper end would be much more problematic than at the lower end, since atmospheric density falls off nearly exponentially with altitude.
SpaceX actually says that StarLink is deployed at 550km, much lower than normal.[1] While this is to decrease latency, it also means their satellites will naturally fall out of the sky in 5 years without periodic boosting of altitude.
Even if Kessler happened at their altitude, we could all just wait a few years for the trash to fall out of the sky. In fact, the more everything smashes together into tiny pieces in said orbit, the faster the problem would solve itself after since as objects get smaller, their surface area to volume ratio increases, which means drag would affect them more per their mass.
https://spacenews.com/starlink-failures-highlight-space-sustainability-concerns/ ↩︎
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for typing all that out. It was interesting.