Starlink satellites: Everything you need to know about the controversial internet megaconstellation

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Starlink satellites: Everything you need to know about the controversial internet megaconstellation

https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html

"SpaceX plans to refresh the Starlink megaconstellation every five years with newer technology. At the end of their service, the old satellites will be steered into Earth's atmosphere where they will burn up. That is certainly commendable when it comes to space debris prevention, however, there is another problem. "

"The vast amount of satellites that will be burning in the otherwise pristine upper layers of the atmosphere could alter the atmospheric chemistry and have unforeseen consequences for life on the planet.

In a paper published in May 2021 in the journal Scientific Reports, Canadian researcher Aaron Boley said the aluminum the satellites are made of will produce aluminum oxide, also known as alumina, during burn-up. He warned that alumina is known to cause ozone depletion and could also alter the atmosphere's ability to reflect heat.

"Alumina reflects light at certain wavelengths and if you dump enough alumina into the atmosphere, you are going to create scattering and eventually change the albedo of the planet," Boley told Space.com.

That could lead to an out-of-control geoengineering experiment, a change in the Earth's climate balance. The effects of such alternations are currently unknown.

Karen Rosenlof, an atmospheric chemistry expert at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), told Space.com she too was concerned about the effects of the particles from the burning satellites in the atmosphere. Rosenlof has expertise in modeling the effects of geoengineering interventions.

David Fahey, the Director of NOAA's Chemical Sciences Laboratory, and Martin Ross, a physics and meteorology scientist at the Aerospace Corporation, both told Space.com that more research is urgently needed to understand the effects of burning increasing amounts of satellites in the atmosphere."

"The problem, the scientists said, is that in those high layers of the atmosphere, the particles are likely going to stay forever. Boley said that while the number of satellites burning in the atmosphere will be considerably smaller than the number of meteorites, the chemical composition of the artificial objects is different, thus the presence of the products of their burning is something scientists know nothing about.

**"We have 54 tonnes (60 tons) of meteoroid material coming in every day," Boley said. "With the first generation of Starlink, we can expect about 2 tonnes (2.2 tons) of dead satellites reentering Earth's atmosphere daily. But meteoroids are mostly rock, which is made of oxygen, magnesium and silicon. These satellites are mostly aluminum, which the meteoroids contain only in a very small amount, about 1%."

As the accumulation of those particles would increase over time, so would the intensity of the effects. It thus cannot be ruled out that over decades the pollution from burning megaconstellation satellites could lead to changes on a scale akin to what we are currently experiencing with fossil-fuel-induced climate change.

"Humans are exceptionally good at underestimating our ability to change the environment," said Boley. "There is this perception that there is no way that we can dump enough plastic into the ocean to make a difference. There is no way we can dump enough carbon into the atmosphere to make a difference. But here we are. We have a plastic pollution problem with the ocean, we have climate change ongoing as a result of our actions and our changing of the composition of the atmosphere and we are poised to make the same type of mistake by our use of space."

Starlink did not respond to Space.com requests for comment."**

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Nexus Needs to consider this Well before moving forward!

Establishing a Wooden Satellite Network that the Japanese are developing might be interesting! However the Internet Instruments would still be Metals!

Maybe only way is to develop Laser Communication Satellites Further out using Regional Download Hubs to capture the Laser Internet Packets

Overall, Telescopes themselves are moving OUT into Space so that isn't really an issue as James Webb has shown!