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Earth’s atmosphere is shrinking and thinning, which is bad news for Starlink and other LEO Sats
(go.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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Not exactly. If it goes into full blown Kessler syndrome, it will become everyone's problem, including at the newly "freed up" lower orbits.
Except that isn't how it works. The lower your orbit, the quicker your orbit decays due to atmospheric drag. If the atmosphere was 10% less dense, this wouldn't significantly reduce that at those altitudes. In the current scenario, if every one of those satellites stopped working right now, the vast majority of them (and their parts) would deorbit within 10 years. This would be a bit of a problem for manned space flight, but wouldn't affect things too much otherwise.
If this was happening in geosynchronous orbit, with comparable amou to of mass, it would be a bigger deal.
That's the problem here though, that effect is lessening. So they're gonna stay up their longer, potentially past the limits of what they can do to avoid collisions. That's going to create problems for lower orbits.