Comment by m4rtink
8 hours ago
Starlinks are in low enough orbit to passively decay in less than 5 years, that really can't meaningfully contribute to a Kessler syndrome.
Chinese mega constellations on higher orbits & their spent stages left in space are a bigger issues.
Still in case it got going & made higher orbits unusable, starlink would likely still work just fine on the lower self-cleaning orbits, not to mention using a partial (and hopefully soon full) RLV for replenishment.
A recent paper came out calculating that it would take two days of lights out at SpaceX headquarters for the whole constellation to shred itself, it was already so reliant on avoidance maneuvers.
SpaceX immediately responded by lowering its target orbits by 70km, the maximum it could legally do without renegotiating formally.
When a high orbit develops Kessler Syndrome, the billions of pieces of debris rain down on lower orbits and cause cascading collisions there, and they keep doing it for centuries.
Not understanding how any of this works, the scientists not being capable of convincing the politicos, or the leaders not being able to escape their local maxima of public stances to recognize a real threat, is a massive, civilizational level hubris. This is pass/fail - the math does not care about our level of understanding or maturity.
5 years is still 5 years and Musk needs A LOT of payload for SpaceX to justify 1 Trillion dollars.
This 1 Trillion Dollar has to be translated to either sending up A LOT of foreign payload OR his payload; All of this payload = new Satelites. Its not like we are sending earth resource up in space to build a dyson sphere.