Der Starlink-Satellit verglüht über der Erde, während die Trümmer in der Umlaufbahn zunehmen

I work in this industry and this is a pretty misleading title. If a satellite is deorbiting then it is not leaving orbital debris lol. All Starlink satellites are in Low Earth Orbit at an altitude that if SpaceX somehow lost control of one, its constantly deteriorating orbit would lead it to burn up entirely in atmosphere in a relatively short period of time. Even if there was a collision of some kind, there would be insufficient energy and velocity to launch any debris into a higher orbit, meaning even the shrapnel would still be trapped in a rapidly deteriorating orbit, leaving no trace after a few days/weeks.

If they’re worried about debris polluting the surface, then even if some material somehow survived reentry, it would be such a small amount of material that it’s not even worth mentioning. Additionally each spacecraft has a planned deorbit out of the way of populated areas out of a needless abundance of caution.

Edit: There is a significant risk if we start launching massive constellations in higher orbits such as MEO because the orbital decay measured in time increases exponentially. From weeks to hundreds of millions of years. Blue Origin just announced a several thousand sat constellation at one of these higher orbits for the enterprise market, which has me a bit worried. If there are collisions at higher orbits then that would indeed be a massive problem. The good news is that the three dimensional space that these satellites inhabit also increases exponentially with altitude, so it becomes much easier to track and avoid collisions, as well as each sat existing in a much less crowded orbit.

This is quite disingenuous because it uses the visual spectacle of a re-entry to validate fears about space junk, even though Starlink is actually one of the first constellations designed to prevent permanent space junk by ensuring everything comes down and burns up.

Between December 2023 and May 2024, SpaceX’s Starlink satellites carried out about 50,000 collision-avoidance maneuvers—twice as many as in the previous six months, averaging 14 per satellite.

Earlier in the program, communication issues led to a near-miss with a European satellite, prompting fixes and the ESA’s plan to automate collision avoidance.China later complained to the UN in 2021 after its Tiangong space station had to avoid Starlink satellites twice, citing risks to astronauts.

In the same period, debris from Russia’s destroyed satellite Kosmos 1408 caused over 1,700 avoidance maneuvers between late 2021 and mid-2022.These incidents, combined with Starlink’s expansion plans, led NASA and the NSF (through the NTIA) to warn the FCC in 2022 about growing risks to low Earth orbit operations, science missions, launches, and radio communications.

Except if they are burning up they aren’t leaving debris