PennyRoyal

How the hell should I know, I’m not a rocket surgeon

Fuming

That’s not how what works? Lumps of rock of varied composition burning up aren’t going to produce the same effects, gram for gram, as lumps of a majority of high-purity aluminium. There is little evidence that meteorites produce specifically high levels of aluminium oxide particles when entering the atmosphere (at least that I can find, I’m not dogmatic about this, I just can’t find any actual evidence that disproves this idea. I wouldn’t mind being wrong!) Even the base estimates seem to suggest that the AlO particles will remain in the upper atmosphere for decades. AlO is proven to be a catalyst for ozone depletion, there’s quite a lot of research about that in relation to rocket exhaust gas.
The numbers of launches, satellites, and deorbits are rising pretty rapidly, so “launching shit for decades” doesn’t really mean as much as you think -

I think you didn’t read that paper at all. It’s not just about mass, it’s about size of object, reentry angle, and the enduring quantity of particalized aluminium that stays in the upper atmosphere. Specifically that these satellite deorbits are predicted to raise that amount over the naturally occurring level by several hundred percent. That’s very much like saying “but volcanoes make co2!” - yeah, but adding a bunch of extra on top doesn’t mean the system will automatically remain stable.

Perplexing, isn’t it? I’m hoping that once a few real-works examples live up to their hype, sodium will gain a bigger share of these installations

Im not mad about this current one.

Both - they have a very limited life span, die in their droves during solar storms, and because of being so low and having no way to be recovered, their deorbiting into the upper atmosphere is going to cause massive damage to the ozone layer over the next 30 years.

Here’s a decent article - https://www.sciencealert.com/satellites-like-starlink-could-pose-new-threat-to-our-healing-ozone-layer

And the study it’s based on - https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL109280

The more that aren’t lithium, the better. Lithium is about as good as we can get currently in respect to energy density and weight. Neither of these things matter for grid-scale, where service life, safety, and environmental cost should be much more of a priority

Now that is a silly hat

It’s not the only problem with them, and potentially not the biggest either - there is no plan to remove or maintain them when they die other than de-orbiting them into the upper atmosphere. A recent study suggests that this will critically harm the ozone layer, and that adding metallic particles in the quantities implied by the number of starlink satellites that Elmo plans to launch could do far more damage to the ozone layer than our previous attempts to screw it up!

Article - https://www.sciencealert.com/satellites-like-starlink-could-pose-new-threat-to-our-healing-ozone-layer

Study - https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL109280

It took me a second to understand that. I thought that you meant that the thing with the eels was a pretty typical sentence in English

Did he not die laughing at his own joke after seeing the donkey/fig situation?