Comment by kemotep

A quick search shows that it’s more like 50 tons of meteorites entering the atmosphere per day. Or over 18,000 tons per year.

If Starlink’s are about 2 tons each (the v3’s are going to be much larger) and they each have a roughly 5 year life span and the 10,000 currently are equally spread over that lifespan (so around 2,000 a year need to be replaced) that’s equivalent to around 10 tons per day of Starlink material breaking up in the atmosphere.

With the 1 million SpaceX datacenters Musk talks about and an original projected satellite Starlink swarm size of 40,000, that number balloons to something like 500 tons per day.

So while today it is only a fraction of the total amount of material breaking up in the atmosphere, the idea that multiple companies could have Starlink size satellite swarms with lifespans measured in a few years we start to easily dwarf what meteorites do.