From the day of the announcement of The Starlink Project, Starlink has been involved in many controversies and has been greatly criticised due to a potential negative environmental impact. This is because a large percentage of the general public believe that launching tens of thousands of satellites into earth’s orbit, can damage the environment. However, SpaceX has assured that they’ve plans are environmentally friendly and provide no harm to it.
The main reason behind this is because the SpaceX satellites will be operating at an extremely low altitude in earth’s orbit as they’ve planned to burn up the satellite after 5 years in the earth’s atmosphere, meaning that space around the earth will be clean and not surrounded by satellite debris. In comparison to SpaceX satellites which disintegrate in 5 years because they are at an altitude of 550km, most satellites already in earth’s orbit are above the 1000km mark meaning it will take them thousands of years to disintegrate.
Another issue is that these satellites are reportedly ruining astronomical studies, as the 420 satellites already seem like constellations polluting the sky as they are almost indistinguishable from real stars. However, to protect astronomical sciences SpaceX has announced that they will change the angle of the 420 satellites so their reflection aren’t visible from earth and from next launch onwards all satellites will be fitted with a sunshade to be invisible from the naked eye.
