Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites are now falling to earth with alarming frequency, according to famed Smithsonian astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell.

McDowell recently told EarthSky that one to two Starlink satellites, created by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, are falling to Earth each day, and he expects that number to keep growing. Of the 12,000 satellites in orbit, about 8,000 are Starlink, with plans for thousands more to enter Earth’s orbit in the coming years.

Avi Loeb, director of Harvard’s Institute for Theory and Computation, told “Morning in America” that for now, there isn’t much to worry about, as “the earth is big and 71% is covered by ocean,” so the likelihood of one of these satellites falling to Earth and killing someone is extremely low.

He explained, however, that with plans for thousands of Starlink satellites to enter Earth’s orbit over the next several years, the Federal Aviation Administration estimated that within a decade, the likelihood that a fragment will hit and kill someone could rise by 61% each year.
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Loeb explained that the Starlink satellites falling to Earth are not unexpected, as they have an average lifespan of about 5 years, and “the idea was to deorbit them and let them burn in the atmosphere.”

“They are small enough for most of them to burn up and not reach the ground,” he added. But some inevitably do reach the ground, not only putting people at risk but also the environment, with the possibility of “pollution of the atmosphere with the evaporation of all these metals.”

“I think lawyers will start to get involved if there’s damage to property or human life,” Loeb predicted.

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Kessler effect

Scientist Don Kessler warned in the 1970s that too many satellites in a similar orbit could lead to a chain reaction of collisions.

Loeb reinforced this warning, explaining that “once you have too many (satellites) out there, they might collide by chance.”

“It starts a cascade where some satellites collide and then break up, and then those fragments break up other satellites and that would be a real problem for anything that we fly,” he continued.