Something never sat right with me on the "they'll just burn up" retort to criticisms about space debris. And I think this the reason why. I'm glad smarter people than me have given a perspective...
Something never sat right with me on the "they'll just burn up" retort to criticisms about space debris. And I think this the reason why. I'm glad smarter people than me have given a perspective on numbers and potential effects.
To be clear, when SpaceX is at full capacity, presuming their sattelites don't get heavier, that's 23 satellites going up/down per day. Each clocking in at 750kg, which translates to about 17 metric tons of metals being vaporized into the atmosphere per day. Not even factoring the CO2 formed from that combustion. That's just shy of 6,300 tons per year. From a single company.
I've officially upgraded Starlink from 'useful but harmful' to 'nowhere near worth the effort,' which puts it firmly into the 'evil' category if the company is not factoring these externalities.
The real issue here is not tonnage, but the specific material composition and elements used in these satellites. Elements that aren’t present in natural meteoroids need to be examined for their impact on the atmosphere, as we can be reasonably sure that typical rock, water ice, silicon, and iron in your average meteoroid are probably fine due to us having billions of years of them hitting us anyway.
The actual heat released by even thousands of satellites reentering the atmosphere is a rounding error at best. The changes to atmospheric composition is the real danger here, and there needs to definitely be more research before we start adding 10x or 100x the sats to the current stuff in orbit.
Agreed that it is the material composition that matters most (launch emissions aside) This bit though: Increasing that tonnage by 15% (again, just by Starlink, not including everything else) makes...
Agreed that it is the material composition that matters most (launch emissions aside) This bit though:
the atmosphere does naturally receive about 30-40,000 tons of interplanetary debris from non-artificial sources
Increasing that tonnage by 15% (again, just by Starlink, not including everything else) makes this bit ring roughly in the same vein as "Human effects of climate change are minimal because volcanoes spew almost as much." Not to say you meant it that way, or even if it is truly significant, but it is one of those factoids that if a real problem with ozone depletion or other hazard is found that the anti-reality crowd will use to deny the reality.
17 tons divided by 30,000 tons is not .15, but 5.67e-4, or .000567 (I think). EDIT: My math is right, but my units were wrong. Should have read a little closer.
17 tons divided by 30,000 tons is not .15, but 5.67e-4, or .000567 (I think).
EDIT: My math is right, but my units were wrong. Should have read a little closer.
That 17 tonne number is daily, so roughly 6000 tonnes per year. 15% increase from the 40k annual baseline. And that's just Starlink. There are multiple constellations being built now.
That 17 tonne number is daily, so roughly 6000 tonnes per year. 15% increase from the 40k annual baseline.
And that's just Starlink. There are multiple constellations being built now.
I mean maybe. We don't actually know the effects of these metals being vaporized in the atmosphere is. It definitely warrants significant funding for further study. The ability for anyone, anyone...
I mean maybe. We don't actually know the effects of these metals being vaporized in the atmosphere is. It definitely warrants significant funding for further study. The ability for anyone, anyone in the world to be connected to affordable, high speed Internet is definitely extremely valuable though.
Here's the kicker though: For all this money being spent, we could just as easily deploy giant meshes of cell towers. Estimates put the annualized cost of a Starlink satellite around $350k given...
Here's the kicker though: For all this money being spent, we could just as easily deploy giant meshes of cell towers.
Estimates put the annualized cost of a Starlink satellite around $350k given its 5 year lifespan. That means the fully operational Starlink network will cost $14 billion a year to maintain, minimum.
The price of building a cell tower ranges between $100k and 200k. And with relatively little maintainence will remain active indefinitely. It can then be easily upgraded and expanded upon as needed.
For roughly the same money, each year we could build 80,000 4g cell towers, covering a minimum of about 20 sqmi each, 1.6 million sq mi of coverage per year, or roughly half of Europe.
It is not raw money preventing this from happening. Rather a lack of coordination and will.
Half of Europe isn't the entire world though. There are certain places where a cell phone tower can't or won't be built, because of either economical or physical constraints, like very sparsely...
Half of Europe isn't the entire world though. There are certain places where a cell phone tower can't or won't be built, because of either economical or physical constraints, like very sparsely populated regions, isolated regions, the middle of the ocean, or the tops of mountains. Having access to high speed data links at those places is very valuable for thousands of use cases, and cell towers are never going to provide that value.
No, I understand. But for every case like 'somebody wants access where the nearest person is 200 miles away and I can't use a geostationary satellite to make an emergency call' is negligible to...
No, I understand. But for every case like 'somebody wants access where the nearest person is 200 miles away and I can't use a geostationary satellite to make an emergency call' is negligible to the benefit that would come from building out infrastructure nearly universally.
To build a cell tower, you provide electricity to a place that otherwise wouldn't have it. Electricity that can provide far more benefit beyond just a net connection.
At a pace of half of Europe per year, we could cover every land mass on the globe inside of 40 years. Ignoring all the land area where that infrastructure already exists would make that far less.
I'll admit that it's a highly optimistic estimate. But with the combination of wind and solar power, long range point-to-point wireless, a few key long-range towers, there is no reason it would be any more difficult than launching 23 satellites into space every day indefinitely.
And if we're willing to look to the past....it's fairly trivial to transmit signals across the world on shortwave radio. The bandwidth might not be able to handle continual video streams, but could certainly handle Wikipedia pages and text emails.
I think that is the biggest hurdle. The logistics of building all that infrastructure and sourcing power in a place without any existing electricity infrastructure seems like a monumental...
To build a cell tower, you provide electricity to a place that otherwise wouldn't have it. Electricity that can provide far more benefit beyond just a net connection.
I think that is the biggest hurdle. The logistics of building all that infrastructure and sourcing power in a place without any existing electricity infrastructure seems like a monumental undertaking to me, and not one you'd want to rush or cheap out on. I am far from an expert, but between figuring out technical logistics, bureaucracy and sorting the funding aspect, I'd expect that process to take years for a single country.
While what you are suggesting is technically true it ignores a lot of social, environmental, and political hurdles that are almost impossible to resolve in a unified way. What if the place you are...
While what you are suggesting is technically true it ignores a lot of social, environmental, and political hurdles that are almost impossible to resolve in a unified way.
What if the place you are building the on-ground infrastructure is politically unstable? Experiencing civil war? The infrastructure will become a target. It's pretty hard for a militia to take down a satellite, not so much for an extremely obvious tower with a lot of infrastructure dependencies (electricity, repairs, telecommunications, road access, etc..).
You would think that the benefits are negligable, but I'm not exaggerating when I say that there are thousands of use cases. There are quite a few remote villages in areas that were never going to...
You would think that the benefits are negligable, but I'm not exaggerating when I say that there are thousands of use cases.
There are quite a few remote villages in areas that were never going to get high speed Internet in any other way that are now connected to the grid. I have personal experience with ambulances that used to not be able to transmit lifesaving medical data to hospitals while en-route to a patient due to cell signal dead zones that no longer have that problem. People who live in rural areas are able to have telehealth visit with specialists using HD video for diagnoses and treatment where they wouldn't before. The technology has already saved lives, and is improving many, many others.
Researchers have access to high speed data links at remote research sites studying everything from climate change to whale biology to particle physics, you name it. That enables all kinds of research that wasn't feasible because how cost prohibitive legacy satellite network access was, or wasn't possible at all before.
Cell towers are great, but LTE has been around for a long while and it still doesn't cover anything but a tiny fraction of the earth's surface. Having comparable speeds literally everywhere you can get a view of the sky is a game changer for human wellbeing in a massive number of ways we know about, and potentially even more that we haven't considered yet.
At a pace of half of Europe per year, we could cover every land mass on the globe inside of 40 years. Ignoring all the land area where that infrastructure already exists would make that far less.
We could I guess, if we really dedicated a ton of resources to doing so, but realistically we never would have. The profit incentive just isn't there for the commercial sector, and massive telecommunications infrastructure projects funded by governments have had a poor track record in the US. Being able to spread the cost of a project such that it costs the company no extra money to connect far reaching terminals is the secret sauce that makes this work economically, and that really only works with satellite internet. Every other form of telecommunications infrastructure is bound to a single location on earth.
And if we're willing to look to the past....it's fairly trivial to transmit signals across the world on shortwave radio. The bandwidth might not be able to handle continual video streams, but could certainly handle Wikipedia pages and text emails.
Shortwave isn't really comparable. It takes a lot of expertise to set up and operate a shortwave transceiver and antenna system, it requires licensing and training, and the bitrate is horrible. Packet radio over shortwave runs at around 300 baud. It would take an hour to even download a 1mb webpage at those speeds. It's not really useful for much besides extremely rudimentary data.
Having that kind of access to the internet so widely available is such a powerful tool that the downsides would have to be really very bad to outweigh it, so despite the guy running the biggest company doing this being a complete asshole, it's worth really getting to the bottom of those downsides before deciding it's an overall negative.
Daily life increasingly depends on systems of satellites orbiting Earth. As fleets proliferate, ever greater numbers of expired units will hurtle back toward the surface.
Decommissioned satellites vaporize when they plunge through the atmosphere, decomposing into their elements, mostly aluminum, with some copper and lithium.
That’s changing the atmosphere in ways that threaten the Earth’s protective ozone layer.
...
Satellites in low-Earth orbit eventually have to come down, and companies rely on the upper atmosphere to act as a waste incinerator. That’s exposed a blind spot in environmental laws: They only deal with pollution from human activities near Earth’s surface. But just as carbon dioxide and ozone-destroying compounds drifting up have created problems, so too can pollutants raining down at ever-increasing rates.
Studying stratospheric pollution is a burgeoning field. The first wave of research that started about 5 years ago shows that dosing the atmosphere with soot from rocket fuel and particles of reentering satellites might set back decades of progress repairing the ozone layer and indirectly alter the weather.
The satellite industry boom could exacerbate the effects scientists have observed. In the next five years, the number of satellites in orbit is projected to grow from roughly 12,000 today to between nearly 60,000 and 100,000. By 2035, Goldman Sachs projects that the value of the satellite industry will reach $108 billion, up from $15 billion today.
Something never sat right with me on the "they'll just burn up" retort to criticisms about space debris. And I think this the reason why. I'm glad smarter people than me have given a perspective on numbers and potential effects.
To be clear, when SpaceX is at full capacity, presuming their sattelites don't get heavier, that's 23 satellites going up/down per day. Each clocking in at 750kg, which translates to about 17 metric tons of metals being vaporized into the atmosphere per day. Not even factoring the CO2 formed from that combustion. That's just shy of 6,300 tons per year. From a single company.
I've officially upgraded Starlink from 'useful but harmful' to 'nowhere near worth the effort,' which puts it firmly into the 'evil' category if the company is not factoring these externalities.
Just to expound a bit, but the atmosphere does naturally receive about 30-40,000 tons of interplanetary debris from non-artificial sources: https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-resources/astronomy-questions-answers/has-anyone-calculated-the-combined-tonnage-of-meteroids-and-space-debris-falling-into-our-atmosphere-yearly/ and https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/asteroid-fast-facts/
The real issue here is not tonnage, but the specific material composition and elements used in these satellites. Elements that aren’t present in natural meteoroids need to be examined for their impact on the atmosphere, as we can be reasonably sure that typical rock, water ice, silicon, and iron in your average meteoroid are probably fine due to us having billions of years of them hitting us anyway.
The actual heat released by even thousands of satellites reentering the atmosphere is a rounding error at best. The changes to atmospheric composition is the real danger here, and there needs to definitely be more research before we start adding 10x or 100x the sats to the current stuff in orbit.
Agreed that it is the material composition that matters most (launch emissions aside) This bit though:
Increasing that tonnage by 15% (again, just by Starlink, not including everything else) makes this bit ring roughly in the same vein as "Human effects of climate change are minimal because volcanoes spew almost as much." Not to say you meant it that way, or even if it is truly significant, but it is one of those factoids that if a real problem with ozone depletion or other hazard is found that the anti-reality crowd will use to deny the reality.
17 tons divided by 30,000 tons is not .15, but 5.67e-4, or .000567 (I think).
EDIT: My math is right, but my units were wrong. Should have read a little closer.
That 17 tonne number is daily, so roughly 6000 tonnes per year. 15% increase from the 40k annual baseline.
And that's just Starlink. There are multiple constellations being built now.
Thank you for pointing that out.
I mean maybe. We don't actually know the effects of these metals being vaporized in the atmosphere is. It definitely warrants significant funding for further study. The ability for anyone, anyone in the world to be connected to affordable, high speed Internet is definitely extremely valuable though.
Here's the kicker though: For all this money being spent, we could just as easily deploy giant meshes of cell towers.
Estimates put the annualized cost of a Starlink satellite around $350k given its 5 year lifespan. That means the fully operational Starlink network will cost $14 billion a year to maintain, minimum.
The price of building a cell tower ranges between $100k and 200k. And with relatively little maintainence will remain active indefinitely. It can then be easily upgraded and expanded upon as needed.
For roughly the same money, each year we could build 80,000 4g cell towers, covering a minimum of about 20 sqmi each, 1.6 million sq mi of coverage per year, or roughly half of Europe.
It is not raw money preventing this from happening. Rather a lack of coordination and will.
Half of Europe isn't the entire world though. There are certain places where a cell phone tower can't or won't be built, because of either economical or physical constraints, like very sparsely populated regions, isolated regions, the middle of the ocean, or the tops of mountains. Having access to high speed data links at those places is very valuable for thousands of use cases, and cell towers are never going to provide that value.
No, I understand. But for every case like 'somebody wants access where the nearest person is 200 miles away and I can't use a geostationary satellite to make an emergency call' is negligible to the benefit that would come from building out infrastructure nearly universally.
To build a cell tower, you provide electricity to a place that otherwise wouldn't have it. Electricity that can provide far more benefit beyond just a net connection.
At a pace of half of Europe per year, we could cover every land mass on the globe inside of 40 years. Ignoring all the land area where that infrastructure already exists would make that far less.
I'll admit that it's a highly optimistic estimate. But with the combination of wind and solar power, long range point-to-point wireless, a few key long-range towers, there is no reason it would be any more difficult than launching 23 satellites into space every day indefinitely.
And if we're willing to look to the past....it's fairly trivial to transmit signals across the world on shortwave radio. The bandwidth might not be able to handle continual video streams, but could certainly handle Wikipedia pages and text emails.
I think that is the biggest hurdle. The logistics of building all that infrastructure and sourcing power in a place without any existing electricity infrastructure seems like a monumental undertaking to me, and not one you'd want to rush or cheap out on. I am far from an expert, but between figuring out technical logistics, bureaucracy and sorting the funding aspect, I'd expect that process to take years for a single country.
While what you are suggesting is technically true it ignores a lot of social, environmental, and political hurdles that are almost impossible to resolve in a unified way.
What if the place you are building the on-ground infrastructure is politically unstable? Experiencing civil war? The infrastructure will become a target. It's pretty hard for a militia to take down a satellite, not so much for an extremely obvious tower with a lot of infrastructure dependencies (electricity, repairs, telecommunications, road access, etc..).
You would think that the benefits are negligable, but I'm not exaggerating when I say that there are thousands of use cases.
There are quite a few remote villages in areas that were never going to get high speed Internet in any other way that are now connected to the grid. I have personal experience with ambulances that used to not be able to transmit lifesaving medical data to hospitals while en-route to a patient due to cell signal dead zones that no longer have that problem. People who live in rural areas are able to have telehealth visit with specialists using HD video for diagnoses and treatment where they wouldn't before. The technology has already saved lives, and is improving many, many others.
Researchers have access to high speed data links at remote research sites studying everything from climate change to whale biology to particle physics, you name it. That enables all kinds of research that wasn't feasible because how cost prohibitive legacy satellite network access was, or wasn't possible at all before.
Cell towers are great, but LTE has been around for a long while and it still doesn't cover anything but a tiny fraction of the earth's surface. Having comparable speeds literally everywhere you can get a view of the sky is a game changer for human wellbeing in a massive number of ways we know about, and potentially even more that we haven't considered yet.
We could I guess, if we really dedicated a ton of resources to doing so, but realistically we never would have. The profit incentive just isn't there for the commercial sector, and massive telecommunications infrastructure projects funded by governments have had a poor track record in the US. Being able to spread the cost of a project such that it costs the company no extra money to connect far reaching terminals is the secret sauce that makes this work economically, and that really only works with satellite internet. Every other form of telecommunications infrastructure is bound to a single location on earth.
Shortwave isn't really comparable. It takes a lot of expertise to set up and operate a shortwave transceiver and antenna system, it requires licensing and training, and the bitrate is horrible. Packet radio over shortwave runs at around 300 baud. It would take an hour to even download a 1mb webpage at those speeds. It's not really useful for much besides extremely rudimentary data.
Having that kind of access to the internet so widely available is such a powerful tool that the downsides would have to be really very bad to outweigh it, so despite the guy running the biggest company doing this being a complete asshole, it's worth really getting to the bottom of those downsides before deciding it's an overall negative.
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