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xp84yesterday at 6:59 PM2 repliesview on HN

Whatever happens to Starlink, the debris in their new lower orbit would decay within months at the worst. It’s not one of those “thousand years imprisoned on the planet by a cloud of deadly debris” that we’ve heard about.

Not saying it couldn’t be bad if there were such a collision as obvi a really bad collision could in the short term damage Starlink and anyone else who decides to use that orbit, but this isn’t existential risk territory anymore.


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Sanzigyesterday at 7:02 PM

VLEO addresses the risk, sure, but the new Starcloud space datacenter hype machine isn't going VLEO, it's going 600-850 km. Those altitudes are in the years to decades range for deorbit, and SpaceX has filed for 88,000 of them.

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shaknayesterday at 9:05 PM

If they always got the decay correct, we wouldn't have confirmed debris impact on the ground. It would be destroyed long before it reached.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/after-fiery-displa...

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