Starlink satellites are dodging objects in orbit thousands of times every month
&gt;Do a search for &quot;atmospheric drag&quot; or anything about orbital lifetimes, gabbard diagrams [0] or the like<p>&gt;nothing, instead it equates all constellations and satellites together as the same thing<p>Yet another click bait crummy article, with the obligatory &quot;concerned astronomers&quot; emotional tug on top but no serious engagement. And &quot;big numbers!!&quot; but no sort of context on if or why it&#x27;s a problem. It&#x27;s so tiresome how this gets trotted out over and over again. SpaceX&#x27;s approach isn&#x27;t bad for debris risks, it&#x27;s good! The absolute best possible fail safe solution for sats is to have them low enough that they will passively deorbit very quickly without continuous boosts, or even better VLEO orbits where they must maintain aerodynamic orientation as well. Which in turn requires lots of sats that are actively replaced regularly, which in turn helps ensure updates can also be made rapidly based on real experience and they can become extremely refined. Sloppily throwing it all into some vague fear panic of &quot;Kessler Syndrome&quot; is not just wrong it&#x27;s actively bad for that very reason vs clear differentiation between stuff at 300-550km vs 700+.<p>Also the implication that the utility function for earth-based astronomers is unlimited and they have some special right on top, ignoring the potential future paths for improvement and approaches that would ensure that (a small tax that would go directly towards a fund for space based telescopes say). And so on and so forth. There are real important discussions to be had which makes it all the more disappointing it&#x27;s so very, very shallow.<p><i>Edit:</i> Also to be clear it&#x27;s not like orbital lifetimes are a new thing to think about. [1] is a classic old school webpage excerpting info from the 1987 &quot;<i>Satellite Orbits in an Atmosphere - Theory and Applications</i>&quot;. It gives both very rough initial guidelines for thinking but then dives a bit more into how m&#x2F;A and solar flux affect that a lot. Keep in mind when looking at the &quot;LOW CIRCULAR ORBITS&quot; section and graph what the m&#x2F;A of diffuse debris looks like vs an original intact satellite (not that Starlink sats are big compact high weight spheres anyway).<p>----<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=mQT5aMa_7iI">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=mQT5aMa_7iI</a><p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spaceacademy.net.au&#x2F;watch&#x2F;debris&#x2F;orblife.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spaceacademy.net.au&#x2F;watch&#x2F;debris&#x2F;orblife.htm</a>