[Interview+] There Might Be A Limit on How Many Satellites We Can Launch

Interesting topic whose time has come. Thank you

I think a good possible solution would be strict environmental regulations restricting satellite re-entry or what materials and how much is allowed to burn up, and some type of high orbit or lunar recycling system for end of life of all other space hardware. Obviously easier said than done, but there is currently a huge market for orbital infrastructure, so if we place the regulations on now, the fines or the companies doing the launches can fund projects like Orbital Reef has planned. A lot of these orbital recycling facilities can be mostly remotely operated, we have space lasers and such so communicating with some semi humanoid robots in orbit or even on the moon wouldn't be too hard or much lag. And many companies already have satellite "retrieval" type functionality with mission extension programs. Plus ambitions to produce high quality microprocessors in space, and regolith processing already being looked at, I think getting some high purity electronic waste would only be a boon to these programs. With international government cooperation on passing legislation for orbital re-entry restrictions we can also get international cooperation to support orbital recycling thusly funding this great space economy we all dream of. A bit of teething pains, but if we don't regulate re-entry pollution we will have bigger issues, so i think its likely to happen as everyone eyes the whole space data center thing. Making it hard to pollute makes it suddenly more profitable to make that space smelter, as now people will pay you to take their space junk away... provided we make the fines high enough. And even with cheap launch capabilities I think there would still be a reasonable market for selling the recycled materials for space manufacturing, and maybe sending back some things like the semiconductor crystals that can be grown better in micro-gravity for use on earth. Only major issues I see; is the AI thing a bubble?, and the whole international cooperation thing too...

This has always been something that I have wondered about. Those giant plumes of chemicals coming out of the rockets. Thanks for clearing it out and making me realize it’s way worse than I thought 😂

I would have thought the most likely climate impact of these aerosols would be cooling of the climate, which could probably offset some of the warming caused by CO2. Of course, there are endless possibilities for lots of unforeseen consequences, but being unforeseen we cannot of course foresee what they are. The problem is, that the way some people think seems to be that we should avoid doing anything where we cannot predict all of the outcomes and are certain there will be absolutely no negative outcomes. The problem is that even the data used for these decisions require more satellites up there to determine whether we can afford to put more satellites up there. Then the other problem is that with international legislation, it only works with countries that abide by international laws. In other words, if two countries abide by the law and a third does not it will give that third country an unfair competitive advantage.

I thought this was a useful interview, particularly the bit at around 12:00 acknowledging that solid rocket fuel exhaust is not really the main concern, because none of the proposed rockets that are going to scale in the way the atmospheric models worry about use solid rocket fuel boosters in the first place. I have never known quite how to feel about the earlier studies I had seen being concerned about the effects of rocket exhaust, because they did seem to be operating under the assumption of increased solid rocket fuel usage as well, and that just seemed incredibly unlikely to be an accurate assumption to be making. Hearing from an expert more about the issues of a more realistic mix of rocket exhausts is something I'd been hoping to see at some point. If I were to propose the question I am most interested in, it would be "What, if any, materials do you think satellites might be constructed out of that would be both atmospherically demisable, and also more or less inert from an atmospheric chemistry perspective?" I can see an argument that one might preclude the other, but I'm not an atmospheric chemist and neither is ChatGPT, so I'd be interested to hear an actual expert's take on that question. And if there is actually a reasonable answer to that question, that seems like a super important thing to raise public awareness of. And if there's not, maybe the answer, in a world with dramatically lower launch costs and higher payload volume/mass, would actually be to not make satellites atmospherically demisable at all, and instead build them to survive reentry and target them somewhere like Point Nemo. Obviously that would have its own set of impacts, but it's possible that might be a tradeoff worth making.