A satellite of that magnitude can have many failure modes, onboard computer will do their best to de-orbit if it encounters unrecoverable failure: it can use thrusters, it can change attitude to increase surface area towards the sun or the atmosphere, rearrange solar panels etc etc. Assisted de-orbit it can be done very quickly. Unassisted de-orbit will take some time. This is a known and solved problem, we have been relying on this for many years. This is what you’re referring to with your links.
What I’m trying to communicate is that if s/c fails in a non-recoverable way, thruster stuck on, pierced propellant tank, adcs failing in a specific way (e.g. you can get unlucky and get particular bit-flipped that pass checksum etc etc), it is theoretically possible to end up in a non-recoverable state. For example: accelerate into an elliptical orbit or due to orbit perturbation catch-up with your neighbors (all of which will need to do orbital maneuvers and waste propellants). This stuff happens. I’m no longer in this field, but my team lost university satellite because of this. Everyone hopes for a nice decay orbit but it can get funky, and very very hard to model.
Lastly, there’re cases where satellites have been destroyed on purpose. Look up Chinese and Russian tests. The debris field produces for this is hard to model, it will propagate and react to solar winds, upper atmosphere disturbances, neighboring objects,.. Small particles pierce through everything. You will not see them, you will not be able to track them.
Imagine a threat actor blowing up one or two of them. Or malfunction leading to collision with a launcher. Or any satellite malfunction and failure to de-orbit in time.
Remember MAD, mutual assured distraction? Well we created another one for access to space
What I found so fascinating about starling is how easy it was for a single country, even a single company in this case, to pollute near-earth space.
I understand the mechanics of LEO, and the de-orbit mechanics put in place.
But the world-wide impact, unknown side-effects on the upper layers of atmosphere on the re-entry of literally thousands of satellites within fairly short period of time?
Not American here. Reading your guys replies it almost feels like you are rejecting the existence of Trump supporters or invalidating their stance. Doesn’t this enforce their argument and created this situation in th first place?
It’s great to have non-US alternatives, but when non-US alternatives become extreme self-centered as EU tends to be(come), I start questioning if this a solution I’m willing to adopt.
Current direction “of protecting the children” will easily put a filter on what you will be allowed to see and find; censorship is just too easy to implement behind the closed doors
IMO this is exactly how it works without the Ai already. I have had a pleasure of renting a plentitude of cars all over the world, and would say that in 10-15% cases there will be reason to withhold or try to withdraw money for “various car damages”, “traffic violations”, “empty gas tank”, .. It doesn’t matter if this is pre-war Ukraine, spain, turkey, small company, large corp,.. Now they just have a tool for that.
Psa:
in most places they would try to scam you by removing a small piece of trim (under the rearview mirror, below bumper,..) and on your return claim it as a damage. That’s why you need to take a video and pics while taking the car. This trick saved me probably tens of thousands of dollars by now.
I assume he built his system and then onboarded the company as a client to it.
Possible issue here is the degree of separation. If he ever worked on the system before he resigned, or re-used some concepts of it, then I’m sure company would sue him and take the system for free.
I’ve considered doing similar for one corp I’ve once worked with. The corp used an obscure hybrid cloud solution, unfortunately, the cloud provider didn’t really understand the corps needs (governance,devex,monitoring) making it impossible to do anything basic without manual action from an administrator. Pretty solvable with a couple of APIs and a few dashboards
Depends a lot on the investor expectations. If they think the opportunity for growth and market expansion is coming to its end, then they would force for higher returns.