The starlink satellites are designed to burn up in the atmosphere. They do this pretty often. But there's plenty of other space junk that's not designed to burn up and should have shown up on radar.
1) if this was big enough to get picked up on a 737 radar I think we would be having a very different conversation...
2) even if it did... rentry velocity is like miles per second, that would give you on the order of single digit seconds to recognize something on an intersecting trajectory and take action...
3) even then, I would bet that an object on this trajectory and speed would get filtered out as noise by aircraft radar because it is so antithetical to the types of things an airliner needs to inform pilots of.
And the Titanic was designed to not sink, sometimes reality is harsh. What is the probability for any of the parts of a starlink satallite to survive a descent?
Way less likely than the non-burned up remainder of some item from decades ago that was never specifically designed to burn up because "that's hard and it'll probably hit the ocean anyway"
It's hard to overstate just how much random junk is up there.
I was excited to see some evidence, but if you actually read the article they're talking about flakes of silicon with less than one joule of energy reaching the surface. To break an airliner windscreen, you need an energy more like a big hammer.
> In one rare instance, the company also revealed that "a 2.5 kg piece of aluminum" found on farm grounds in Saskatchewan, Canada, was traced to a Starlink satellite.
A piece of debris of similar size to this is what I'd guess could cause the kind of damage we see in the incident involving the airliner.
So while most Starlink debris may be harmless by the time it reaches the surface, we know this doesn't always happen as expected.
And since the vast majority of reentering space debris is from Starlink satellites, that'd would be the first place I'd look.
To be totally clear, I am doubtful this is actually caused by space debris, but I don't think it's entirely unreasonable for it to be one of the most likely causes.
> The starlink satellites are designed to burn up in the atmosphere.
How high in the atmosphere, though? They're not likely to hit the ground, sure, but 36,000 feet isn't the ground. Second, designs fail. 432 Park was designed not to have cracking and spalling concrete, yet NYT has a story today about exactly those things. Third, people lie about designs and capabilities. Pretty sure anyone who has ever worked in computing (especially with VC involved) has seen that. Who made that claim, and did they ever back it up?
I'm not saying that Starlink is the culprit here. The evidence is thin. OTOH the possibility can't just be dismissed because of a claim about a design to prevent a similar (but not identical) thing.
I pressume its much easier to design something to burn than to do anything else. You are basically just restricting yourself on material selection. The goal isnt for something to not fail, the goal is to fail. Its like asking to build a lawnmower that doesnt have to cut grass, and can look however you want. If you produce a pebble, it fits those criteria.
The atmospheric entrance for these (starlink) sattelites is basically as shallow as possible, so the object spends the most time possible in high atmosphere (think 60-90 km, where the atmo is thick enough to engulf the object in plasma, yet extert low pressure to slow it down, prolonging the time its burning. In otherwords, you couldnt achieve better parameters to burn stuff on deorbit.
All of it will probably be fully burned way before 50km - planes fly at 8-12
"Probably"? Even in their defense you felt a need to hedge, and that should tell you something. As another commenter has pointed out, Starlink has admitted that some components might survive re-entry. Let's not fall all over ourselves trying to give Musk and Co. more benefit of the doubt than they even give themselves.
Im just a rando on the internet, Ive never inspected the sats to know if they are not using materials that just wont burn up, hence "probably".
Im just listing facts to help you make a picture, I am not trying to "defend" anyone/anything. Please try to free your political/corporate bias from ingesting new information.
I haven't read the latest version of their ODAR (orbital debris assessment), but earlier versions of the satellites had a couple pounds of material that wasn't expected to burn up
