Except for space junk in orbit, over blown concern.
Orbit. Simple, stop all the war mongering stuff and stop all the competitive commercial stuff. Do one to three of everything in an integrated cooperative system. Especially stuff above a certain altitude/orbital life time or in certain critical orbits.
Of course this is not what we are going to do.
Preface with, didn’t read the article. Elon Musk could do his part, but won’t/can’t!
Starlink satellites deorbit on their own. What else is SpaceX leaving in orbit? (Serious question, maybe there are small components the launch systems lose?)
You can filter here to show the SpaceX group, which is a whole bunch of Falcon 2nd stages. It isn’t like anyone else puts effort in to deorbiting their 2nd stages, SpaceX just launches the most.
They also dump Dragon 2 trunks and used to dump some Starlink deployment hardware (which I think is now attached to the 2nd stages), but those two examples are in such low orbit that they don’t last long.
Thanks for doing the leg work, I wasn’t sure where to start and figured I’d end up down a rabbit hole…too easily distracted!
