Elon Musk's Starlink satellites could be falling out of the sky
The global satellite network could be in big trouble
Featured Image Credit: Andrew Harnik / Staff / Getty
They say that what goes up must come down. While that's all well and good, it's not exactly what Elon Musk wants to hear when it comes to his Starlink satellites.
Away from buying up X, his ventures with Tesla, building tunnels with the Boring Company, and ambitions of heading for Mars with SpaceX, Elon Musk is again reaching for the stars with the aptly named Starlink.
While there have been some grumbles about the monthly cost of Starlink, the world's richest man has continued his efforts to bring high-speed internet to all corners of the world.
Whether you're up a mountain or stranded on a desert island, Starlink aims to give you access to the World Wide Web.
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We've already covered potential problems with the Sun killing off Starlink satellites, while there are concerns about what their emissions are doing to the cosmos.
At the time of writing, there are over 8,400 satellites in orbit, although that number could soon be tumbling.
According to EarthSky, Starlink satellites are literally falling from the sky, coming down at an alarming rate of up to two a day.
The outlet explains how Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell has spotted fiery trails across the sky, with them coming from Starlink satellites.
The dreaded Kessler Syndrome is already clogging Low Earth Orbit, but as more companies compete for this area of space, McDowell suggests the number of satelittes dropping out orbit could be about to exponentially increase: "With all constellations deployed, we expect about 30,000 low-Earth orbit satellites (Starlink, Amazon Kuiper, others) and perhaps another 20,000 satellites at 1,000 km [620 miles] from the Chinese systems.
"For the low-orbit satellites we expect a 5-year replacement cycle, and that translates to 5 reentries a day. It’s not clear if the Chinese will orbit-lower theirs or just accelerate us to chain-reaction Kessler syndrome."
The idea is that the more satellites that crash into each other, the more space debris there will be. The more space debris there is, the more the chances of further collisions increase.
With over 700 Starlink satellites potentially dropping out of orbit every year, they're in danger of coming down faster than Musk's company can get them up there.
Some have been incorrectly identifying falling satellites as meteors, although McDowell has explained how to spot the difference: "The easy ‘meteor vs. space junk’ discriminator is speed. A meteor from solar orbit, even a big fireball, lasts only a few seconds and is gone, whizzz. Space junk goes more like airplane angular speed (really faster than a plane, but higher so it cancels out) and may be overhead for a couple of minutes."
Social media is flooded with videos of 'space junk' like Starlink satellites making dramatic displays in the sky, with questions about what can be done. Various factors are causing the satellites to reenter the Earth's atmosphere, and even though operators can potentially boost them back up, we're reminded of a 2022 incident when a solar storm doomed 40 recently launched Starlink satellites to crash back to Earth with a bump.