You want them to pay a multi-trillion dollar clean-up and cancer fund for car-sized multi-year-service-life satellites burning up in the atmosphere? How much do you want incumbent multi-decade culprits to pay?

EDT: I should have clarified I'm not only talking about incumbent satellite companies because people are replying about the launch volume. Think about pollution from oil companies and coal plants and consider how that compares to an aerospace company. How much have polluting companies been fined relative to multiple trillions of dollars?

we cannot have private trillionaires milking "privatize the profits and social the costs"

no more, it has to end immediately

they aren't just silo-ing their wealth, they are leveraging against societies, funding far-right violent politics against society

even the evil Koch-brothers have cancer wings in hospitals around the country, Musk doesn't give a dime to charity, just his own foundation which he controls to only do what he wants to manipulate

pre-pay costs to society before damaging society

also, criminal murder charges for those who enable actions like, "poisoning a water supply," "creating an opiode epidemic," "giving millions of people cancer, knowingly"

I just don't understand why, killing one person is murder, but killing hundreds over many years is, "just the cost of doing business."

Would be nice for oil and gas companies to pay for all the emissions say, starting when they found out about it and decided to lie to the public. Maybe also bring charges against the PR firms they used since given those same PR firms worked for the tobacco industry clearly they won't stop until there are consequences.

Unrealistic, I know, but one can dream.

> How much do you want incumbent multi-decade culprits to pay?

You are clearly not grasping the magnitude change in how many satellites we used to launch vs how many we are launching nowadays.

In 2026, we are putting 10x as many objects in space as we did just 8 years ago, with Starlink being the bulk of it: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-....

Starlink has 12.5k satellites in space and looking to ramp up massively, the biggest "multi-decade incumbent", oneweb, has 5% as many, about 600.

We want incumbent multi-decade culprits to also pay appropriately.

I talk about it all the time.

He's generating a lot more pollution. It's reasonable to want equity around externalities, which is a distinct problem under capitalism.

Do you have any proof that starlink satellites are worse than the tons of space debris that enter the atmosphere every day?

The satellites aren't worse. It is the rockets that are worse. On the way up they emit various things into the stratosphere, which is about the worst place you can emit stuff when it comes to affecting the atmosphere.

It has not been a major problem so far because in its entire history humanity has only launched around 35000 rockets that have reached the stratosphere. Ramp that rate up significantly and it comes something we serious need to worry about.

(That's not to say that space debris reentering the atmosphere isn't bad. It also unfortunately deposits various things in the upper atmosphere that we really do not want to put there).

You may want to compare the emissions of all rockets annually to the emissions of jet planes daily and reconsider your position.

Yeah we should do something about both issues, good on you for bringing that up

You may want to compare the flight profiles of jets and rockets, what layers of the atmosphere they emit in, and how the effects of the things they omit vary by where in the atmosphere they are emitted.

Hmm, I noticed you didn't mention car exhaust in your comment. Perhaps you would like to reconsider your position. I am very smart.

Can't have nice things because someone else is worse

So let's add more???

The amount of matter which enters Earth's atmosphere from non-manmade sources is far higher than any conceivable amount of space junk today.

But a significantly different makeup than plain old rock dust.

It is gonna be mostly aluminum, lithium, and silicon isn't it? Nothing too extraordinary or weird.

Citation needed.

I’m not sure that “we don’t make satellites out of rock and ice” needs a cite, but here you go.

https://research.noaa.gov/noaa-scientists-link-exotic-metal-...

> Niobium and hafnium do not occur as free elements in nature, but are refined from mineral ores. They are used in semiconductors and superalloys.

> In addition to these two unusual elements, a significant number of particles contained copper, lithium and aluminum at concentrations far exceeding the abundance found in meteorics, or ‘space dust.’ “The combination of aluminum and copper, plus niobium and hafnium, which are used in heat-resistant, high-performance alloys, pointed us to the aerospace industry,’’ Murphy said.

No citation required, just some light thinking