Starlink began to put his satellites in orbit in 2019, with the promise to bring a quick and safe internet connection to the most remote areas on the planet. Over the six years, the company has reached about 4 million private customers. Accumulated a constellation (continuously growing) of over 6 thousand operational satellites. And he won a place of honor among the worst spatial pollutors of the globe: the now omnipresent flocks of Musk’s microsatellites are in fact a source of light pollution, which is making astronomical observations from the surface of our planet more complicated, but also A more traditional source of pollutants, deriving from the continuous returns to the atmosphere of defective or retirement satellites, which risk having harmful effects on the layer of ozone and on the climate of our planet.
The trend of the return of the Starlink satellites – Deorbiting in technical jargon – has been growing for several months. As recently confirmed by the astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, researcher of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory with a passion for monitoring objects in Earth orbit, now proceeds to the rhythm of four or five returns per day, 87 in total only in January 2025.
No Uh-Oh, it will Almost Completely Burn up. They are netiring and incinerating about 4 or 5 starlinks every day at the moment, Spread Across the World, Sometimes You Get One At Night Time in the Us.
– Jonathan McDowell (@Planet4589) Janogy 29, 2025
According to the data collected by McDowell, the number of satellites abandoned by Starlink has splashed in the middle of last year, when the company started to retire first generation devices, and has undergone a second surge in December. In total, of the 7,821 satellites launched by Musk, 817 have already returned to the terrestrial atmosphere. And it is no coincidence that the numbers are so high, since they are designed to be operational for a period of about five years, after which they must be replaced with new models.
Everything is therefore regular, if it were not that when they disintegrate these spatial scrap they release huge quantities of polluting powders in the highest layers of our atmosphere: metals such as aluminum (which turns into aluminum oxide by burning at high temperatures) that can Damage the layer of ozone that protects our planet, and which at the same time reflect the light coming from the sun, and accumulate they risk modifying the earth’s climate, with impossible effects to be predicted.
4 Starlink satellites fall every day
Currently 40% of abandoned and ready to be deorbited satellites belong to Starlink. But the percentage is destined to grow in the future, given that the project involves almost 40 thousand orbital repeaters in the coming decades. It is expected that by 2033 something like 3,600 tons of satellites every year will burn in the Earth’s atmosphere. To which must be added the debris from the non -reusable stadiums of the rockets with which they are put in orbit: four tons of metal and plastic at each launch, for about 300 launches a year (in 2025, also destined to certainly increase in the future ).
Currently, the estimates of the environmental impact of the satellites that fall into the atmosphere are not particularly dramatic: they would be responsible for about 12 percent of the ozone destroyed by the space sector, which in turn represents just 0.1 percent of what each one is lost year due to human activities. Scientists like McDowell, who dedicated a study published last October in the scientific date on the subject, however, warn that the fact that by burning in the highest parts of the atmosphere, the satellites deposit their pollutants directly where more damage can do, e Where they are probably destined to remain for decades, if not centuries, with potentially exponential effects that we could find ourselves discovering only games made.
For this reason, there are those who ask to review the text of the Montreal protocol which ban the substances that damage the layer of ozone, to also take into account the satellite sector and, in particular, the return procedures, in view of the increasingly massive diffusion of the megacostellazioni expected in the next decades. With the climate that pulls the White House these days, however, the problem will be likely to be postponed to a later date, at least for now.