Every day, four to five Starlink satellites fall from orbit and burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. Spectacular fireballs streak across the sky. Social media lights up with meteor sighting reports. Most people don’t realize they’re watching controlled demolition.
SpaceX is decommissioning its first-generation Starlink satellites, making room for newer models. The company plans to deorbit 100 satellites over the coming months. By design, they’re supposed to completely disintegrate on reentry, leaving nothing to hit the ground.
But complete disintegration doesn’t mean no consequences.
Each satellite that burns releases about 30 kilograms of aluminum oxide into the upper atmosphere. Multiply that by five satellites per day, 365 days per year, and you’re dumping tens of thousands of kilograms of metal compounds into the air we all breathe. Scientists warn these particles could affect atmospheric chemistry, deplete ozone, and contribute to climate change in ways we’re only beginning to understand.
The FAA isn’t buying SpaceX’s safety assurances. Their recent report projects that by 2035, reentering satellite debris could cause one human casualty every two years. SpaceX disputes this, insisting their satellites fully vaporize. The disagreement reveals a deeper problem: we’re conducting a planet-scale experiment with incomplete data.
This is just Starlink. Amazon’s Project Kuiper is coming. China is planning multiple mega-constellations. Soon, the deorbit rate won’t be five per day. It could be dozens. The sky is becoming infrastructure, and like all infrastructure, it eventually becomes trash.
We wanted global internet from space. We got it. Now we’re learning what it costs.
The Commons Dilemma#
Humanity has always treated the sky as infinite. Throw something up there and it’s gone, out of sight, no longer our problem. But orbital space, like the oceans before it, turns out to be finite after all.
The tragedy isn’t that we’re building mega-constellations. It’s that we’re doing it without fully understanding the long-term atmospheric cost. By the time we have enough data to know the real impact, thousands more satellites will already be burning up overhead, writing the bill in aluminum oxide across the sky.