Blue Origin
I don’t understand this company at all. Why would they add this to the mix? It really seems like Bezos’ only motivation is to compete with SpaceX for everything.
TBF this is a very different proposition than Starlink, enterprise-only, MUCH higher bandwidth (6 Tbps!) and presumably higher latency due to the larger distance to earth. To my knowledge nothing like this has been proposed by anyone so far.
I hope they have proper risk assessments, de-orbiting protocols, and especially important build in a way/with materials that don‘t ruin the night sky.
Not holding my breath.
I hate seeing the star link satellites in the sky. Shouldn’t there be some sort of law about how much garbage some company can put up there? How long do these things even last and how long until the technology is outdated or obsolete?
It’s actually pretty well understood that a starlink satellite’s life span is approx. 5 years at which point it is intentionally deorbited, and any malfunctioning satellite’s orbit would naturally decay within a few years as well.
That being said, I agree that there should be regulations about this. Feels like we’re in a bit of a wild west situation.
Starlinks are good to passively deorbit from around 500 something km, but Amazon is higher at around 600km, Oneweb out at 1200km, Gouwong with a shell at 1100km, SDA at 900+… I’m more worried about the other ones with less experience that could die and stay up there.
Reminds me of the novel The Cassini Division by Ken McLeod where space launches are no longer possible after a runaway ablation effect turned Earth’s near orbit into a lethal debris field.
The Kessler effect is the basis of quite a few cool stories. I wish this all stayed science fiction, but apparently no, we really want to go through it.
Yay more space junk!
