Maybe it will cancel out global warming by interfering with
sunlight?? We are sooo clever??
Donkeyman!
Thanks for posting this news Omah, and there probably are going to be problems especially when they eventually fall back to earth, and they will!
However…
How many aeroplanes are in the skies at any one time…? I estimate more than a hundred times more than the total amount of satellites.
And the trouble with graphics like this is…If it was to scale the size of each satellite would be so small that you wouldn’t even see it with the naked eye…
We sometimes forget how big this planet and its surrounding atmosphere really is…
Something all too often neglected when discussing man made climate change.
Transport that can whisk you to the other side of the world in 24 hours, or skype etc that can beam pictures of your loved ones around the world in real time certainly make the world look small.
But if you were to travel in space amongst all these satellites you might be lucky to spot one all day, they would be that far apart…
Consider the Atlantic ocean, a million times smaller than satellite territory, and the amount of shipping present on it (thousands of craft) and yet you can sail for three or more days without spotting one vessel…
.
Apparently:
https://www.rd.com/advice/travel/how-many-planes-are-in-the-sky/
Depending on the time of day or time of year, there could be anywhere from 8,000 to 20,000 planes mid-flight at any given moment, according to Flightradar24, which keeps track of flights in real time. You’re most likely to find numbers on the high end of that range in the summer when it’s between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. Western European Time because at that point, flights in North America (where it will be morning) and Europe (where it will be afternoon or early evening) will be active, the analysts say. Typically, the year’s busiest flight day is in July or August on a Thursday or Friday.
That’s a lot less than I thought but that amounts to anywhere between 100,000 and 200,000 flights per day, including private, business and military aviation.
Good point …… 
But then there’s orbital debris:
Orbital debris is any man-made object in orbit about the Earth which no longer serves a useful function. Such debris includes nonfunctional spacecraft, abandoned launch vehicle stages, mission-related debris and fragmentation debris.
There are more than 20,000 pieces of debris larger than a softball orbiting the Earth. They travel at speeds up to 17,500 mph, fast enough for a relatively small piece of orbital debris to damage a satellite or a spacecraft. There are 500,000 pieces of debris the size of a marble or larger. There are many millions of pieces of debris that are so small they can’t be tracked.
Even tiny paint flecks can damage a spacecraft when traveling at these velocities. In fact a number of space shuttle windows have been replaced because of damage caused by material that was analyzed and shown to be paint flecks.
“The greatest risk to space missions comes from non-trackable debris,” said Nicholas Johnson, NASA chief scientist for orbital debris
“Many millions” is a lot more than I thought …… :shock:
Whilst l agree with you generally OGF, l differ when it comes to
this p!anets atmosphere, lf you see the planet from space the
depth of the atmosphere compared to the size of the planet you will
see that it seems to be very thin in relation to the globe, in fact it
looks very mimimal and vulnerable? So l do believe it may be
possible for us, especially as we proliferate, to have some sort of
influence on it? However l keep an open mind on whether we can
compete with the forces of nature!
Donkeyman!
Erm … is that expensive NASA tool bag still floating around in orbit?
And another hunk of junk … that fridge the astronauts dumped out of the space station?
I wouldn’t mind but us Earthlings have to dispose of our old fridges safely. They should be made to take it to the tip like everyone else.
What causes orbital decay?
is it too much sugar in your diet?
BDonkeyman!
Tool kit dropped from space station is orbital junk no more
By John Matson on August 3, 2009
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/news-blog/tool-kit-dropped-from-space-station-2009-08-03/
And another hunk of junk … that fridge the astronauts dumped out of the space station?
I wouldn’t mind but us Earthlings have to dispose of our old fridges safely. They should be made to take it to the tip like everyone else.
AFAIK, the fridge got incinerated, too … :!:
Ah, I did wonder. So the tool bag came home (incinerated) in 2009.
It’s a magical fascinating place … though I did snigger when I read once about skywatchers wishing on a shooting star … which was more likely a frozen waste dump chucked out of the space shuttle.
And not before time …
European Space Agency to launch space debris collector in 2025.
Robotic junk collector will be first mission to remove item of debris from orbit.
Now there’s a bit of innovative job creation. Bet Trump wishes he’d thought of it first for out of work NASA boffins.
The ClearSpace-1 mission, scheduled for launch in 2025, will cost €120m and will grab a single piece of junk. But the agency hopes the mission will pave the way for a wide-reaching clear-up operation, with Esa’s director general calling for new rules that would compel those who launch satellites to take responsibility for removing them from orbit once they are retired from use.
The target for ClearSpace-1 is a piece of junk called Vespa, which was left in an orbit around 800km above the Earth by ESA’s Vega launcher in 2013. Vespa weighs 100kg – around the size of a small satellite – and was selected because it has a simple shape and sturdy construction, which make it unlikely to fragment when it is grabbed.
The “chaser” ClearSpace space probe will be launched into the target orbit where it will track down Vespa, grab it using a quartet of robotic arms and drag it out of orbit, with Vespa and the chaser both burning up in the atmosphere on the way down to Earth.
I used to have a Vespa 150GS which weighed 100kg and I’m sure I left that parked in someone’s back bedroom in 1969 … 
It’s good news about a “clear-up”, though …
At over 120million a peice it sounds very affordable and practical
to me?
Donkeyman!
Again, look at the scale of earth compared to the space junk, with 480,000 pieces no bigger than a softball…
Okay, let’s put things in perspective…
So its generally accepted that Earth’s atmosphere stretches approximately 60 miles out into space. Only habitable without breathing apparatus for Four miles high.
Now lets look at man’s distribution on the surface of the Earth.
71% is covered by oceans…
27% is mountains or deserts and uninhabitable by humans.
Man could possibly inhabit the remaining 2% but doesn’t…
We are but a small speck on the face of this planet, and the chances of us having any effect on climate, other than locally is ridiculous…
What goes up, must come down, spinning wheels (you know the rest)
Very informative illustration OGF, Which confirms that the earths
atmosphere is indeed, to all intents and purposes only four miles
thick, no more than a short walk across town? Compared to the dia
of the globe this is insignificant imo? And l believe that given enough
time, it is possible for us to cause enough change to trigger off a
natural process which will then have to complete its course?
I totally agreenwith you that humans alone cannot start a process
off, but if a natural cycle has allready started and is nearing its peak
then our inputs could produce a sort of multiplyer effect?
Thanks for the diagramns.
Donkeyman!
Unless it goes up at over seven miles a second Savvy!
NDonkeyman!
A threat indeed - I’ve posted about it previously:
While recording the annual Perseid meteor shower from Hawaii, this camera happened to capture a parade of satellites. The group of 15 dots moving through the sky are SpaceX’s Starlink satellites.
As of July 2023, there are 4,519 Starlink satellites in orbit, of which 4,487 are operational.
A “streak” of Starlink satellites:
Dhara Patel, an astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich said: “These satellites are about the size of a table, but they’re very reflective, and their panels reflect lots of the Sun’s light, which means that we can see them in images that we take with telescopes. These satellites are also big radio wave users… and that means they can interfere with the signals that astronomers using. So it also affects radio astronomy as well.”
Dr Dave Clements, an astrophysicist from Imperial College London, believes the satellites could have a real impact on observations. "They present a foreground between what we’re observing from the Earth and the rest of the Universe. So they get in the way of everything. And you’ll miss whatever is behind them, whether that’s a nearby potentially hazardous asteroid or the most distant Quasar in the Universe.”
He said it would be particularly troublesome for telescopes taking large surveys of the sky, such as the future Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) in Chile.
He explained: “What we want to do with LSST and other telescopes is to make a real-time motion picture of how the sky is changing. Now we have these satellites that interrupt observations, and it’s like someone’s walking around firing a flashbulb every now and again.”
Inevitably, as the pursuit of profit takes precedence over the pursuit of knowledge, the skies of Earth will be littered with thousands, even millions, of metallic man-made objects … 