Earth's atmosphere is shrinking and thinning, which is bad news for Starlink and other LEO Sats Earth's atmosphere is shrinking due to climate change and one of the possible negative impacts is that space junk will stay in orbit for longer, bonk into other bits of space junk, and make so much mess that low Earth orbits become less useful. That miserable set of predictions appeared on Monday in a Nature Sustainability …
If you bothered to read this article and the one you linked to, you'd realise that they are referring to different parts of the atmosphere. However, even that wouldn't change your mind about the cause of global heating because, once you go down the conspiracy rabbit hole, there's no getting back out.
Using insults is counterproductive and implies you have no strong case for your point of view.
During the Medieval warm period which some claim only affected the Northern Hemisphere the Antarctica penguins thrived due to warmer weather which indicates there was increased warmth in the Southern Hemisphere as well during the Medieval warm period all without an increase in C02.
Google "Historical population changes of Adélie penguins in the Ross Sea region", read the paper & then reason why CO2 is the main driver & possibly what caused the Medieval warm period.
Medieval warm period: my bingo card is filling out nicely..
Mikey Mann said the MWP didn't happen, because the trees told him.. because trees make such excellent, high precision thermometers. Except when they don't, but then they just hid the decline. It's ironic that the actual denial comes from the carbon cultists.
The penguin study uses 'sediment' cores (ie penguin poop) to show that the MWP very likely happened in Antarctica. Which is yet more evidence that it was a global phenomena, especially as a lot of climate/weather stuff tends to be constrained north & south because the bulk heat transfers are mostly from the equator polewards. But it's one of those science vs climate 'science' issues, like the MWP & LIA happened, but we don't really know why, apart from there being no correlation with CO2.
But it's also one of those fascinating things that may have relevance wrt satellites. So the LIA correlated with the Maunder Minimum, and if we're entering another Grand Solar Minima, we might see the same effects. Plus there are other longer term bits of fun, like our declining magnetosphere which will also be a factor.
"Using insults is counterproductive and implies you have no strong case for your point of view."
Nah, just that we are sick to death of refuting lame and counterfactual talking points, only to have them pop back up as though nothing happened.
Eventually it becomes obvious that presenting a strong case, or just saying "get stuffed, moron", have the same impact, but that the former gives less satisfaction and requires a lot more effort.
>> Burning these fuels, generates tons of extra CO2, which makes the heat-trapping blanket thicker and thicker, warming the planet.
"Blanket thicker" - this is also what we call an "analogy". "If the atmosphere was a blanket, that blanket is now thicker". There may - or may not - be a literal "thickening", or at least an increase in density[1] but that article is very much an introduction for the non-scientific (well, more for the not-yet-scientific-but-we-want-to-get-you-started).
Just in case anyone wants to try "you can't say on this page the atmosphere is getting warmer but then say here it is getting colder" I'll point you to the conspiracy that mass air movements are obviously not caused by localised pressure changes, that is just the story put about by Big Wind.
[1] 'cos CO2 biggerer than just O2! Duh!
Thicker as in more dense? Or more voluminous?
"you can't say on this page the atmosphere is getting warmer but then say here it is getting colder"
Yes I can. The atmosphere isn't a column of gas with a uniform temperature/pressure profile. The tropopause is one interesting point where there is an inflection or change in temperature gradient. it moves up and down with seasons as well as distance from the poles.
It depends on what you mean by 'losing satellites'. Starlink is occasionally "losing" satellites all the time, because these sats simply stop working as a result of particle impact or radiation. And that is in turn because these sats are designed to be relatively cheap, as well as easily discardable and replacable, rather than super-robust but super-expensive. This is how the sats and the network they form are designed.
If you mean "losing satellites" in terms of these sats falling out of orbit and plummeting down in flames... No. That's not happening right now.
FWIW -- Starlink satellites are mostly in 550km (give or take) circular orbits which suggests that they should last 10 to 20 years (depending on future solar activity) before re-entering on their own. However, the plan seems to be to deorbit them intentionally after about 5 years of service.
It is happening right now. That was the plan all along. Otherwise LEO would get filled up.
See: spaceweatherarchive.com/2025/02/19/unprecedented-starlink-reentries/
"First generation (Gen1) Starlink satellites are being retired to make way for newer models. “More than 500 of the 4700 Gen1 Starlinks have now reentered,” says McDowell."
Apparently getting 2 or 3 coming down some days.
Except the man made climate change deniers…
Except the 'deniers' are generally interested in the real science. So what, if anything would be the impact of injecting a few tonnes of aluminium particles into the upper atmosphere, where they'd become aluminium oxide nanoparticles as the aluminium rapidly oxidises. Which could have implications for ozone, it being O3 and a more reactive form of plain'ol oxygen. And then Al2O3 being a commonly used white pigment, it would have a small effect on albedo, ie reflecting sunlight and acting as a sunscreen. And then as the particles drift down, acting as nucleation sites for water, and making it rain.
But then there's the usual problem of scale, so yes, there would be effects because physics and chemistry. But the atmosphere is rather big, so the effects would be small in the grand scheme of things.. Or it's been suggested as a form of geoengineering to counter 'global warming', but it would take a lot of aluminium oxide to have any effect.
I saw an article on MSN (I didn't say it was a good one - in fact, just read on...) that was a pretty transparent attempt to add another smear against Elon Musk, implying as it did that this was some terrible string of accidents that were happening because Musk Id Not A Nice Person and he is obviously conning people into buying Starlink kit when he knows the satellites won't stay up.
Unfortunately, like a lot of propaganda (regardless of whose side you're on, that's what a lot of it is - and both sides do it), it was the sort of article written for people who do not understand what is going on and why, by people who either have no clue either or, worse, do know what is going on and stir up trouble because they don't like someone - in this case, Musk.
Also unfortunately, too many people trust and believe the media hype and scare stories and don't bother asking if, maybe, the publisher has a reason to push that view.
If the atmosphere contracts as this suggests, does this not then open up a slightly lower orbit with a molecular density similar to the current environment we use for these satellite constellations?
Somewhere between the Caribbean Sea and the Sea of Tranquillity there must be a region with any given density.
If the atmosphere contracts as this suggests, does this not then open up a slightly lower orbit with a molecular density similar to the current environment we use for these satellite constellations?
Yep. It's one of those good news, bad news things-
The inset figure shows that millions of satellites may operate in the lowest altitude shells while avoiding Kessler syndrome instability. Debris from collisions is removed almost immediately at these low altitudes, so collisions can happen at a very high rate and the environment will remain stable. However, few operators would choose to place their satellites in such a region under those circumstances, so the operational requirements probably become the active constraint in the lower shells.
The SSP cases show that in addition to the cyclic variability in IKC that comes with the solar cycle, secular reductions in mass density from thermosphere contraction have a real impact on the overall capacity of this region. By 2100, considering SSP5–8.5 as the worst-case scenario, a 50% reduction in capacity is observed at solar maximum with a 66% reduction at solar minimum.
Lower density means less drag, so satellites might last longer. Downside is debris in orbit may also last longer, increasing the risk of collisions and Kessler syndrome. It's an interesting attempt to calculate carrying capacity at low orbits, but the 'safe' capacity is still high, ie 'millions of satellites'. But the paper also focuses on variability within the regular 11yr solar cycle, not what might happen during a Grand Solar Minimum, which we might be approaching.
Yes, the paper actually discusses that. The downside is that dead satellites and miscellaneous junk in higher orbits will take even longer to burn up on their own if the thermosphere contracts or if future solar activity is lower than expected. There was a long period called the Maunder Minimum in the late 1600s and early 1700s when solar activity seems to have been very low.
Keep in mind that there are also factors other than collision possibility (actually rather low at present) affecting orbit choice. Coverage area, transmission delays, and such.
Is this what happened on Mars 4 billion years ago? The Mars atmosphere started thinning, then the Mars seas disappeared and only a few satellites (ours) on Mars these days. I wonder if aliens are seeing our environment and saying, "Oh look at that again, we've seen it so often."
And if they were merely in geosynchronous orbit it would take a day or so for a nuclear weapon to reach them. Plenty of time for them to disable the rocket boosting it letting it drop back to Earth. If they landed maybe we could nuke their landing spot, but a cursory analysis of our atmosphere would tell them we have that capability so they wouldn't land if their intent was to take our planet.
They could just drop rocks on us to fill the atmosphere with dust, blocking the sun and starving us. Presumably it would take them some time to get here, if so they would be willing to wait a few years until we're all dead.
Not that I'm worried about this if someone came all this way it wouldn't be to wipe us out. We're centuries at minimum from posing any sort of threat to aliens living on a nearby star system, and there's a decent chance we wipe ourselves out before we get there so it would be a waste of resources for them to attack us in the lifetime of anyone currently alive.
So far this is just anthropogenic climate change cockup not conspiracy.
I was just considering if a recalcitrant nation (say Borogravia†) found it in its ineffable interest to completely sabotage Starlink and its ilk and arranged for fragmentation device(s) to be simultaneously detonated in the low Earth orbits these satellites use.
The question I posed myself was how much mass you would need to achieve these nefarious ends requiring say 1.0g fragments (~ball bearings.) The area at 500km is about 600 million square kilometres where I imagine the altitude range is roughly 100km [500km-600km] so a fairly tight radial detonation say from 550km would have to spread into roughly 62 billion cubic kilometres which appears pretty thin but it stays there (albeit slowly losing altitude from thermospheric drag) until it either hits something or reenters the atmosphere.
What immediately struck me was the problem might be like nuclear fission. There are apparently ~7,000 starlink satellites in orbit with masses v.2 800kg, earlier vv. 260kg so all up 1,620t to 5,600t of Musk shit which might well be a critical mass that the detonation of less than, say, 100t of a fragmentation munition might destroy enough of those satellites to cause a chain reaction to take out everything else in LEO.
Launch as a service could make this feasible for even third rate powers if the operators were not too particular about their clients (and their payloads) and operated in a low regulation jurisdiction. (Poetic justice if SpaceX were that provider.)
† stubbornly autocorrected to Belgravia which would have amused Sir Terry, I suspect. :)
I was just considering if a recalcitrant nation (say Borogravia†) found it in its ineffable interest to completely sabotage Starlink and its ilk and arranged for fragmentation device(s) to be simultaneously detonated in the low Earth orbits these satellites use.
It's been done, sort of. So the US was experimenting with boosting OTH transmissions, and decided to launch a cluster bomb into orbit that yeeted out a lot of small needles. Can't remember the name of that experiment, but I think it lead to scientists saying 'Bad idea! Really bad idea!' and lead to treaties about littering in space. Especially given the needles remained a hazard for years. But for nefarious things, all you'd need to do to deny service for Borogravia is look up the orbit(s) Starlink is using to provide coverage over that territory. Then yeet a cluster bomb into the same orbit, or probably retrogade, detonate it and then sit back and wait for the fireworks. Which I guess would also work as an orbital DoS given that orbit would be unusable until the fragments de-orbited.. And if the fragments are low mass/low drag, that would take years.
You're thinking of Project Westford. The 'needles' acted as a sort of artificial ionosphere. As noted on Wikipædia, most of the needles were blown around by solar radiation pressure and re-entered after a few years. Unfortunately, some deployed incorrectly and formed lumps. A few dozen clumps over 10 cm (i.e., large enough to be tracked) are still up there, along with (presumably) some clumps too small to track.
In re a retrograde orbit : that would be a little difficult for the Starlinks, since there are a lot of orbital planes. Probably conceivable, though. Quite a while back, I read an article pointing out that sending a spacecraft past the moon, then using lunar gravity to assist insertion into retrograde orbit, could put an object into a retrograde geostationary orbit.
The advantage of this is that there's only one orbit plane, and all those valuable geosats are in one consistent orbit. Gently release your debris cloud, and twelve hours later, you've wiped out most of the geosats. (Admittedly, yours along with everyone else's.)
A few dozen clumps over 10 cm (i.e., large enough to be tracked) are still up there, along with (presumably) some clumps too small to track.
Yep, that's the one! I used it as an example a few times when I talked with school kids to get them interested in engineering. Was an interesting experiment from a communications pov with the needles being sized for half the wavelength and acting as dipole antenna. Then the concept becoming obsoleted as we entered the satellite era, then fibre & the Internet age, and then radio+fibre= their smart phones. Plus the unintended consequences of engineering, and that experiment risking satellites.
In re a retrograde orbit : that would be a little difficult for the Starlinks, since there are a lot of orbital planes.
Plus a lot of Starlinks. But to do nefarious things, you'd only need to disable a few of them. So picking on a real-world example, if Russia wanted to disable Starlink in Ukraine, it would only need to mine the orbits passing over Ukraine, and those are published. But then of course it'd also deny service to every other country covered by those orbits. I've read some stuff that Russia might already be doing some anti-satellite things to try and blind or jam satellites being used in that conflict, but details are obviously scarce. So curious if Russia could use beam forming to target Starlinks while they're overhead and jam signals, and Starlink being non-military, how resistant they'd be to jamming attempts.
Gently release your debris cloud, and twelve hours later, you've wiped out most of the geosats. (Admittedly, yours along with everyone else's.)
Yup, but that's one of those interesting bits of space politics. Russia, being further north developed Molniya orbits to cover it's territory, so may be less reliant on the standard geostationary orbit.
if Russia wanted to disable Starlink in Ukraine, it would only need to mine the orbits passing over Ukraine...
It doesn't work that way. The Starlinks go around the earth every hundred minutes or so, with the earth rotating underneath them. So the same Starlink that goes over Ukraine now will, a hundred-odd minutes later, be going over someplace about 20 degrees longitude to the west, say Poland or Germany. And a hundred minutes after that, France or the UK. And in between, going around the earth and covering various places in Russia, Australia, and (depending on whether it's northbound over Ukraine or southbound) the Americas. You can't ruin service for just one part of world; you can only degrade it for some part of the world some of the time, to be replaced by other Starlinks a little later.
And in between, going around the earth and covering various places in Russia, Australia, and (depending on whether it's northbound over Ukraine or southbound) the Americas. You can't ruin service for just one part of world; you can only degrade it for some part of the world some of the time, to be replaced by other Starlinks a little later.
Err.. That's what I said. Because orbits are, well, orbits.. You couldn't DDoS LEOs by mining just the territory overhead of Ukraine. You could mine an orbital path that includes Ukrainian airspace, but that would also affect other countries along that orbit. It would still probably be easier to just use beam weapons to jam or cook satellites as they passed overhead, which would have less risk of poisoning that orbit long-term. But still a tad hostile and easily detected, if Starlinks start dropping our or erroring as they pass over that airspace. Then it'd be a case of how quickly SpacX could replace gaps in their constellation, which for v3 satellites is currently 'not very'.
Or because they're being used offensively to attack Russian territory already (see Poland's complainst to Musk for more info), maybe their earthstation serving Ukraine would have a bad day via sabotage or even Orsehnik.. But that's the kind of thing that would lead to WW3 territory. Until Starlink gets their sat-sat links and meshing working though, that would also leave a gap in coverage.
Even worse though, considering the plan is to get 40,000 of them in orbit, that's 30,000,000 Kg of junk aluminum oxide to puncture through the fragile ozone layer (before the fragmentation munition solves it good).
All that mass at 500 km orbit will slow the earth's rotation to a crawl and before you know it we'll be facing the eyes of the sun right smack through the ozone layer hole, and WaMmO! fried like chicken in a Ronco Platinum just-set-it-and-forget-it digital rotisserie ... crispy on the outside and all ...
Poetic justice indeed, but only if we stay moist and tender on the inside IMHO!
Referring to the linked articles:
Each 250kg Starlink satellite can produce approximately 30kg of aluminium oxide nanoparticles during burn up.
So 40,000 satellites represents a potential 1,200,000kg of aluminium oxide nanoparticles, from this single constellation.
A smaller number, but still a potential problem.
Additonally, the burn up has the effect of consuming not only a large amount of aluminium but also significant amounts of many other rare and expensively refined metals. It does seem the bargain basement (ie.quick and dirty) option for disposal of old satellites has been chosen.
Whoopsy! My bad ... mixed up ounces with kg ... a common mistake in this field (and finance) ... ;)
Cue the music! Fireball XL5
I wish I was a Spaceman,
the fastest guy alive!
...
The only problem with Fireball XL5 was that the show was about 24 minutes long (made to fit a UK commercial TV 30 minute slot), and the first 4-5 minutes were the same loooooong launch sequence of XL5.
So you ended up with about 18 minutes of story (taking the closing credits into account).
I bought the collected set on DVD, and the repetitiveness of the opening sequence starts to grate if you're binge watching the series, and the chapter marks aren't really that helpful.
Stingray actually had shorter opening credits, so they don't have the same effect, and by the time they had to fill a 48-51 minute slot with Thunderbirds, they had got the trick of the forward flashes of the programme to fill out the length, although the stock shots of the launch sequences also managed to fill out the time.
So far, I have the complete Fireball XL5, Stingray, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, Joe 90 and UFO. I don't really think I will bother with Twizzle, Torchey, Four Feather Falls or The Secret Service, but I may pick up Supercar on a whim if I see it. If I have time on my hands after I retire, I may pick up Space 1999, although I'm only really interested in series 1, I didn't really like the direction of series 2.
Ah, the memories of Saturday morning TV in the '60s when they used to be shown.
Peter Gathercole,
I remember hating Joe 90 as a kid. I don't remember why. I'm a bit younger, by the late 70s not all of them were getting regular repeats. Loads of Thunderbirds, Fireball XL5 and Joe 90. Not so much Stingray or Captain Scarlet and I don't remember ever seeing UFO as a kid. I think I saw that by borrowing a DVD in the 90s. About the time I made the mistake of re-watching Blakes 7 - should have stuck to happy childhood nostalgia, rather than watch the actual thing.
I came across an episode of a more modern Thunderbirds a couple of years ago, turned my TV on one Saturday morning and it was on ITV, so I watched about ten minutes. Just looked it up, and it was called Thunderbirds are Go (made between 2016-2020). David Tenant was in trouble, and being rescued by Thunderbird 2. I thought it was rather good. Quick look on IMDB suggests they were working through their Doctors, they've also had Sylvester McCoy and Peter Davison.
I recall seeing UFO as a very young boy when I came downstairs well after bed time. Probably around age 4.
Thunderbirds Are Go was quite fun. Blake's 7 is awesome. Grim, gritty and with the second most awesome space ship of all time. The most awesome space ships of course being the somewhat disposable Eagles.
Strangely, the first TV showing of UFO was put in the Saturday morning slot, just like the earlier shows. I don't think the schedulers actually realised that there were ideas and even scenes that were not really suitable for young children.
At the time, I think we had just transitioned from ATV to London Weekend Television (for the Saturday morning slot), so there was probably enough turmoil for them to not have realised the tone shift in UFO.
I'm not sure that Southern (which we could also receive, and had different scheduling as did all of the Regional ITV companies) ever carried UFO in that slot.
I do remember coming across it in a 10:30 or 11:00 PM slot sometime in the mid '70s. More recently, it had a long set of repeat runs on Forces TV on Freeview, but I think that channel has stopped broadcasting (even though it was a SD channel, you needed a DVB2 receiver to pick it up, but I think it was broadcast to British Forces Overseas as well).
The modern Thunderbirds is a show that was made relatively recently using computer animation. It was produced by an Australian TV company. I know that Gerry Anderson was not super impressed, but as he had sole the entire rights to ATV, he has no control over any of the Thunderbirds IP (which is why the atrocious live action film was allowed to be made).
I think that the rights are slowly reverting back to the Anderson Estate, and there are companies called Anderson Entertainment (set up by Jamie Anderson) and Century 21 Films Ltd. which between them are gathering together the IP to make it available in various forms again.
Let me make sure I understand this ... more CO2 is radiating more heat out, making the atmosphere cooler due to global 'warming'?
And this along with the huge increase in sea levels drowning cities and the boiling oceans?
And ... you want more taxes for NetZero, higher energy prices, reduced food production, collapsed economies? That's ok as long as I can virtue signal I'm saving the planet.
That’s correct.
The real problem is the rate at which heat is radiated into space.
Greenhouse gases in the lower atmosphere act like insulation (hence the greenhouse analogy), preventing heat being transferred into the upper atmosphere (and then into space), hence why the upper atmosphere is becoming cooler.
Greenhouse gases in the lower atmosphere act like insulation (hence the greenhouse analogy), preventing heat being transferred into the upper atmosphere (and then into space), hence why the upper atmosphere is becoming cooler.
You didn't read the paper, did you?
In the stratosphere, mesosphere and thermosphere, infrared radiation from CO2 plays an important role in the energy balance by counteracting the solar ultraviolet energy absorption from ozone and molecular oxygen. Conduction pulls heat from the upper thermosphere into the region between 90 and 135 km where it is radiated by CO2 (refs. 2,3). Thus, increasing concentrations of CO2 inevitably leads to cooling in the upper atmosphere. A consequence of cooling is a contraction of the global thermosphere, leading to reductions in mass density at constant altitude over time.
CO2 in the upper atmosphere leads to more cooling because more energy is radiated back to space. CO2 in the lower atmosphere does the same thing, and the 'insulation' only lasts for a tiny fraction of a second as energy is conducted, convected and radiated ever upwards.
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