Yeah, they actually design them with reentry in mind to maximize the burn-up and ensure no pieces hit the ground. I recall they had a bit of difficulty when they first introduced laser data links to the design because the lenses the satellites used were large pieces of glass that would make it to the ground on reentry, they had to redesign them to fragment more easily.
Then read the article. They found debris from starlink satellites on the ground, which is horrifying if you consider they want to increase the number of satellites by a factor of 100x and make them much bigger to build datacenters in space.
That plan would lead to one re-entry every three minutes, depositing insane amounts of plastics and metals in the atmosphere even if they would burn up completely.
Is anyone really planning on building data centers in space? I assume everyone who knows how physics works is aware that cooling will be nearly impossible with today’s tech.
They probably burn up also
Yeah, they actually design them with reentry in mind to maximize the burn-up and ensure no pieces hit the ground. I recall they had a bit of difficulty when they first introduced laser data links to the design because the lenses the satellites used were large pieces of glass that would make it to the ground on reentry, they had to redesign them to fragment more easily.
Then read the article. They found debris from starlink satellites on the ground, which is horrifying if you consider they want to increase the number of satellites by a factor of 100x and make them much bigger to build datacenters in space.
That plan would lead to one re-entry every three minutes, depositing insane amounts of plastics and metals in the atmosphere even if they would burn up completely.
Is anyone really planning on building data centers in space? I assume everyone who knows how physics works is aware that cooling will be nearly impossible with today’s tech.
It’s not as impossible as you think. Scott Manley did an analysis of the heat budget recently and it’s quite reasonable.