One thing to note - The science is still calculating. Yet. SpaceX (and presumably others) are allowed to continue and increase what they're doing. This is the bass ackwards way to protect future us.

Its the same mentality as driving in a random direction for 20 minutes while someone looks in the car for the map on the off chance that when you get the map open you'll be where you wanted to be anyway.

It has the potential (and at this point, just the potential) for planet level changes, and is being done by one group. Should I, a random dude, be able to do something that might possibly affect the entire planet, and the planet as a whole just have to wait and see how it turns out?

The hopeful thought that its probably nothing, before anyone can prove that it's probably nothing, makes a bet where the short term wins are mine, but any long term losses are everyone else's.

Its good to keep an eye out for new sources of pollution, but the possible ozone depletion from satellites burning up is a tiny tiny fraction of what we're doing on Earth right now for pollutants.

The roughly 10-centimetre-long cube is made of magnolia-wood panels and has an aluminium frame, solar panels, circuit boards and sensors. The panels incorporate Japanese wood-joinery methods that do not rely on glue or metal fittings.

When LignoSat plunges back to Earth, after six months to a year of service, the magnolia will incinerate completely and release only water vapour and carbon dioxide

Huh? I’m confused.

At least the article came with the numbers. Given what I regularly read about all the pollutants we daily pump into the atmosphere, the numbers in this article for the materials being atomized is...well, they're very small in scale.

Basically, if a few hundred tons per year is hurting the ozone (and other things), just imagine what the billions of tons per year of emissions does.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

While researchers have largely focused on the pollutants being released by rockets as they launch, we've only begun to understand the implications of having thousands of retired and malfunctioning satellites burn up in the atmosphere.

"Only in recent years have people started to think this might become a problem," said coauthor and University of Southern California astronautics researcher Joseph Wang in a statement.

Since it's practically impossible to get accurate readings from the kind of pollutants satellites release as they scream back through the atmosphere, scientists can only estimate their effects on the surrounding environment.

By studying how common metals used in the construction of satellites interact with each other, the team estimated that the presence of aluminum increased in the atmosphere by almost 30 percent in 2022 alone.

They found that a 550-pound satellite generates roughly 66 pounds of aluminum oxide nanoparticles during reentry, which would take up to 30 years to drift down into the stratosphere.

"The environmental impacts from the reentry of satellites are currently poorly understood," the researchers note in their paper.

The original article contains 371 words, the summary contains 176 words. Saved 53%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!