I hate Elon maybe even more than the next guy, but there are some major exaggerations here:
Starlink makes tons of maneuvers to avoid collisions: https://www.space.com/starlink-satellite-conjunction-increase-threatens-space-sustainability
Starlink is at an orbit that they are quickly returning to Earth and burning up on re-entry: https://cybernews.com/news/starlink-lost-200-satellites/
Sadly, it seems both sides of any discussion have now mastered hyperbole, manipulating statistics, leaving out facts and stretching the truth to make their argument. You basically can’t believe anything you read any longer.
I appreciate the fact-check!
Spoiler: It’s 0.1 tonnes of CO2e per subscriber per year. This is not mentioned in the article.
This includes for example the emissions generated in the course of constructing the rockets that launch the satellites. So far it’s unclear to me whether, when comparing to terrestrial telecom, they include e.g. the emissions produced when manufacturing the trucks that deploy the infrastructure.
Thank you, I was wondering how high the emissions could possibly be for Internet access from the customer’s perspective. I figured simply owning a car probably smashed even “30x as much” as other ISPs
This also means the amount of emissions per user will go down the more users they get. It’s not very fair to compare something new to something that’s been around for decades in something that is based solely on the amount of users they have. I hate starlink, but this report is trash.
Emissions are going to go down when starship is made as well.
Starship uses a methane + oxygen fuel which burns cleaner, and can be produced with just water and CO2 making it carbon neutral.
I don’t think every flight will be neutral immediately, or what % will be consistently once its scaled up, but it’ll be better.
But 1 carbon neutral flight sending up hundreds of satellites will bring it down quickly. They could even save the carbon neutral flights for themselves for PR purposes.
