To put this into perspective: Before the first Starlink launches began in 2019, only about 40 to 50 satellites re-entered per year. SpaceX just brought down ten years' worth in only six months, adding an estimated 15,000 kilograms of aluminum oxide to the upper atmosphere."
https://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=05&month=08&...
Shout out to NEKAAL for watching the skys and keeping our little speck of dust a bit safer from the vast reality of space.
Apparently earth soaks up ~400-800 kg of aluminum oxide in cosmic dust each day.
So with 1-2 starlink satellites producing 30kg each dissipate each day, that's adding about 10% to this figure.
I'm not sure if the cosmic dust aluminum finds itself in the same places up there as the dissipating starlink aluminum. Maybe that could be figured out from the above paper.
This could have a significant effect, I don't know.
Are those ~400-800 kg of aluminum oxide in cosmic dust each day uniformly distributed, and if not how big are those clouds of aluminum oxide that the earth is travelling through? Those 30kg from the satellites are going to be extremely concentrated and therefore take longer to "soak up".
I wonder how much aluminum oxide we get though from disintegrating meteors and other impacts every day. Quick search suggests 50-100t of mass from meteors on average each day - similar total to the dust. Those might be more concentrated and analagous to the starlink satellites.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024JD04...
Either make a meaningful argument or stop insinuating through omission that there's a real problem here. You're not only insulting the intelligence of your readers but also, thereby, undermining your cause.
The article you linked is garbage. Its authors find (of course not controlling for multiple comparisons) an effect that looks statistically significant if you p-hack it just right, then juxtapose it with overdetermined and badly simulated South polar vortex behavior to create the false impression that these satellites are killing the planet.
The real motivation behind pieces like this is personal enmity towards Elon Musk. It could not be more obvious. These people pollute our intellectual commons and degrade whatever remains of their intellectual honesty to run tendentious pieces that let them tell their friends they're sticking it to bad rocket man.
Why are NOAA and NASA funding this stuff?
On the scale of the Earth, my completely uninformed intuition is that 15k kg of alumina doesn't feel that significant. I'd guess that rocket production and launch emissions are way more harmful. But don't know.
Nit: You're off by about a factor of 3 because it's 14.6 t/day.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/antarctic-study-s...
Apparently around 1.4%.
So the starlink satellites dissipating could increase the aluminum oxide arriving up there by ~10% - depending which numbers are correct I suppose it could be anywhere from like 3-30%.
NOAA collects reports[1] of what is done in the US but they don't officially regulate it. They currently have 1,113 reports publicly available.
[1] https://library.noaa.gov/weather-climate/weather-modificatio...
However, quick Google now I can find research which has determined pure rare earth metals in the upper atmosphere coming from satellites and boosters and so on, but nothing about the consequences, and I thought I recalled something about consequences.
Starlink’s next-generation V3s, which will require Starship to launch, weigh in around 2 metric tonnes [1]. (They’re currently “around 260 and 310 kilograms” [2].)
“Every day, Earth is bombarded with more than 100 tons [91 metric tons] of dust and sand-sized particles” [3]. So we’re talking about a 2 to 10% increase in burn-up by mass. (Not accounting for energy, which natural burn-up has more of, or incomplete burn-up, which reduces the atmospheric effects of artificial mass.)
Broadly speaking, we don’t seem to be in a problematic place in respect of the atmosphere. Where improvement may be required is in moving from splashdown, where we sink space junk in the ocean, to targeted recovery.
[1] https://starlink-stories.cdn.prismic.io/starlink-stories/Z3Q...
[2] https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-elon-musk-next-gen-starlink...
[3] https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/asteroid-fast-fa...
Then again, so are CFCs, CO2, radioactive materials...
Just because some elements naturally occur on Earth doesn't mean we're completely insensitive to where they end up. (That said, I have no idea if atmospheric Aluminium is actually a problem or not.)
This source[0] says satellite reentries are about about 12% of the space industry's contribution to ozone depletion (the big one is chlorine from solid rockets), which in turn is 0.1% of the entire anthropogenic contribution; i.e. satellite reentries are ~0.01% of the total.
https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-reentry-pollution-dama...
>0.01% of anthropogenic ozone depletion
Satellite reentries in 2022 (ie mostly pre-megaconstellation) were already raising stratospheric AlO levels by 29.5% above normal levels (with satellites adding 'only' 17 t/year), but megaconstellations could raise that to ~480% above natural levels (360 t/year).
This isn't a rounding error, it's a non-trivial change in chemical composition across the entire globe, and effecting a complex and poorly-understood part of the climate system. What could go wrong?
What else can this effect (as usual, discovered belatedly) beyond ozone? Hopefully it's nothing! But I guess we're gonna find out...
[0] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL10...
> The researchers found particles containing the rare elements niobium and hafnium. They also found a significant number of particles contained copper, lithium and aluminum at concentrations far exceeding the abundance found in space dust.
v1.5 is like 300kg, the v2.0 mini (ironic as its far from mini compared to its predecessors) are 800kg.
The V3's are the one's that need StarShip to deploy. But the current launch platform can take 21x v2.0 Mini's per launch vs the 60x v1.5's they did before.
Taking in account that the v2.0 Mini's are way more capably on a kg/capacity. And the tech keeps getting better. SpaceX does not really need Starship, that is more or less a bonus at this point.
Starship is the moat SpaceX needs to be developing today to stay ahead of where the Chinese competition will be in 5-10 years.
Human CO2 emissions are well under 10% of natural CO2 emissions, and yet that additional amount has been enough to increase the atmospheric concentration of CO2 by over 50% and substantially alter the planetary climate.
CO2 in the atmosphere is at a vastly larger scale than mass falling in from space, so that doesn't mean this is a problem, but that percentage certainly seems to indicate that the question should be studied further.
For example, Starlink satellites orbit so low, that even if every single one of them collides and becomes dust, it will all decay and burn up in a matter of months, a couple years at most. The debris cannot physically move to higher orbits to affect other “normal” satellites, though it might impair launches.
Conversely, collisions at much higher geosynchronous orbits can’t possibly create a dense debris field as the total area is immense, deorbit will take millions of years, and everything is usually moving at the same speed (the synchronous part).
But all the bits the bits that end up with more energy than the orbit the satellites were on obviously do move up, and some bits will move up very substantially as we know from Mission Shakti debris: debris from that event at 300 km got apoapsis of up to ~2200 km.
That is way too long. The threshold we are speaking of cannot allow any fragments, because they start chain reaction and destroy more satellites. And there is always one which is on the highest level. What if that gets destroyed?
How many you can fit depends on the available technology. It should eventually be a lot more than 70K just in those low orbits... and still leave plenty of space for rocket launches and returns to thread their way in between them.
It is enough if it goes one round around. They can make a cascading effect which can destroy tens of satellites at once, and few fragments are enough. And closer to earth you are, less space there is. They can't all orbit on exactly the same level. There is always one which is on slightly higher level.
Because there isn't a problem. LEO contains more than 200x the volume of commercial airspace.
We run out of spectrum and launch capacity well before Kessler cascades become a problem.
The further out you get, there's less atmospheric drag and each satellite is in view of the ground stations for longer but the cost of launch is higher and latency becomes a big issue. People expect 50ms latency for internet access not 500ms.
I will again note that if Saber Tooth tigers had put things in the orbits we have, it would still be our problem.
radio bandwidth: higher frequencies travel a shorter distance and provide more bandwidth. so you get frequency contention and also you need your sats to be physically closer
latency: the further a sat is, the higher the latency. not an issue for text messages. a huge issue for phone calls and general internet tasks. the further you "push" your sat "back", the worst the user experience is
there's other issues too, like geostationary vs geosynchronous and coverage and exposure.
(Caveat: Not an expert by any means, just someone who had a similar question and did some reading, so my answer may well be incomplete or not fully correct.)
It seems much better for an old non-functional Starlink satellite to burn up in the atmosphere instead of continuing in an uncontrolled orbit. I believe most burn-ups are controlled intentional deorbits.
Quoting a older post i made on the subject:
-------
Take in account, that a lot of those are replacement sats for the first generations that they are deorbiting already. Do not quote me on this, but its a insane amount (i though it was around 2k) of the first generation that they are deorbiting. If there is a issue, its not the amount of sats in space, but more the insane amount of deorbiting StarLink is doing.
Starlink wanted to put up insane numbers, but a lot of their fights contain a large percentage of replacement sats.
And they are getting bigger ... v1.5 is like 300kg, the v2.0 mini (ironic as its far from mini compared to its predecessors) are 800kg.
So before StarLink launched 60x v1.5's but now they are doing 21x v2.0 Mini's per launch.
The technology has been improving a lot, allowing for a lot more capacity per satellite. Not sure when they start launching v3's but those have like 3x the capacity for inner connects/ground stations and can go up to 1Gbit speeds (compared to the v2's who are again much more capable then multiple v1.5s).
So what we are seeing is less satellites per launch but more capacity per sat. This year is the last year that they are doing mass 1.5 launches, its all now going to the v2.0 "mini" (so 3x less sats).
Or are those larger ones also ones that have a longer shelf life?
(~8,500 actively in orbit)
The team I'm working with is just doing a cube sat which has pretty straightforward demising but overall it was interesting to see the thought and strategy that people put into this.
Remember orbit is not like a flying airplane. Those things are going so fast friction forms a plasma that eats away at the object as it decelerates. If you can expose more surface area that effect will eat away at much more of the object. So you design it to have through-bolts or other fastener designs where the outermost portion of the fastener burns off quickly, allowing the whole assembly to rapidly disassemble and vastly increase surface area.
People used to think the oceans could just slurp up all of our garbage and plastic forever without a problem. Yet, here we are.
ChatGPT says we get between 50 and 100 metric tons of material a day, mostly silicates and iron/nickel metals.
https://www.starlink.com/public-files/Starlink_Approach_to_S...
The unexpected accumulation of metals in the stratosphere, discussed in the article, is clearly not intended.
> It seems much better for an old non-functional Starlink satellite to burn up in the atmosphere instead of continuing in an uncontrolled orbit. I believe most burn-ups are controlled intentional deorbits.
This is irrelevant to metals like aluminium accumulating in the stratosphere.
There's this meme about how only recently launched starlink satellites are problematic for astronomy, but when people bring it up they usually don't mention that by virtue of the constellation's size and reentry frequency there's always going to be a bunch of recently launched satellites.
Yes, most of us are pretty angry at/disappointed in Elon these days but there are better places to focus than this.
Not a real thing. (It was proposed as a possibility. We searched the parameter space. Mostly in the context of militaries trying to figure out how to deny orbits to an adversary. It's really difficult, to the point that even if one were intentionally trying to cause Kessler cascades, they wouldn't deny an adversary access to orbit.)
My start-up is called Strato Mines - collecting rare earths from 120km above earth. Willing to give 1% at a 100B valuation to any qualified investor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...
[1] https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-reentry-pollution-dama...
And just as Tesla's stock goes up whenever there are reports about them no longer selling cars, or being years behind on self-driving tech and robotics... if Starlink would be publicly traded, their stock would now shoot way up.
On a more serious note: If analysts would do their job, they could have found out years ago that Starlink will never ever be profitable, just as no Sat ISP in history ever has been. All always have and are funded with tax-payer money.
Why is that? Simple maths.
Including R&D and launch cost and expected usage time, the TCO of one of their satellites will be somewhere in the area of $2,000,000. One of them in theory has a peak speed of 100 GBit/s. If you overbook the link by a factor of 10 as it is common for an ISP, that gives you 1,000 Gbit/s to sell.
So in best case over the lifetime of the system you will make a revenue of 1,000 * $100 * 36 months. So you end up somewhere in the area of $3,600,000. Yes, that is more than $2,000,000, but well, there are a couple of billions of investments and investor money here to be paid back one day.
"But why are you only assuming a usage time of 3 years?"
While Musk's idea of rapid R&D cycles is fine for Software, it's extremely expensive. The "Oops, the Sat-to-Sat links are not working, so we now have to build base stations everywhere and can not do load distribution" might have cost Starlink something like $10 BILLION? I guess I would have tested my stuff first before launching it. With now two generations of Starlink sats already being outdated and/or falling from the sky, the "in two weeks" promises from Musk don't make me very confident that Starlink v3 will actually be properly tested prior to polluting space with their buggy trash again.
But let's restart it in a much simpler way: A currently used commercial fiber cable can do 800 GBit/s, so eight times of a Starlink Satellite. Real-life data has already proven that the lifespan (outdated transceivers etc) is somewhere around 5-8 years, with the biggest risk being your cable getting cut. The cable itself costs virtually nothing. Due to this "developing" countries have mostly decided to not lay fiber underground. In Thailand for example, the fiber cables are simply thrown onto houses and through the jungle, as replacing them is dirt cheap. Anyway: If you map this to the TCO on 3 years as mapped above, this means compared to the TCO of $2,000,000 for Starlink, for fiber you are looking at something in the area of $10,000 instead. It's a no-brainer.
Real-life proof: I live on a tiny and very very remote Island in Asia. Some people used to have Starlink here. But due to their Satellites now being massively overbooked, speeds went down months to months. So people noticed that it is actually cheaper to run 10 KILOMETERS / 6 Miles of Fiber cable through the jungle. And on this tiny remote Island there are three Fiber ISPs to choose from. Two of them offer 1 GBit/s for $13 per month, and if you want a business service, for $40 you can get 2 GBit/s down / 1 GBit/s up. And unlike Starlink those ISPs are profitable.
You have to be EXTREMELY remote for Sat internet to make sense. No, not rural USA. Fiber will be cheaper. No, not Africa. Fiber through the desert will be cheaper. Sat Internet may make sense if you live in the artic or on mount Everest or something like that. Or Mars. In all other cases the TCO of Fiber will win.
Your entire analysis rests on this point, which you fail to demonstrate. (You also cite zero sources, which isn't encouraging.)
(EDIT: This assumption is conservative, but reasonable.)
Was this AI generated?
> The cable itself costs virtually nothing
Did you attempt to look up the cost of laying new fibre trunk?
> due to their Satellites now being massively overbooked, speeds went down months to months
Then this isn't a remote location. Starlink's economics have been pretty obvious for anyone who has been on a plane, boat or train in the last decade. They're also terrifically useful for remote mining, observation and military operations.
> people noticed that it is actually cheaper to run 10 KILOMETERS / 6 Miles of Fiber cable through the jungle
Well sure, if you ignore negative exernalities a lot of stuff is cheap.
Anyway, yes, I am a human.
And it is not that hard to find the sources for this point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshiel...
v1 constellation was completed in 2021, and decommissioned from 2024. v2 deployed from 2023, but the sat-to-sat communication is not working, so all of them, will need to be replaced by v3, too.
I don't believe you were a bot, but there were one or two phrasings that gave me pause. (If I believed you had written that with AI, I'd have just asked that and not bothered engaging.)
> v1 constellation was completed in 2021, and decommissioned from 2024. v2 deployed from 2023, but the sat-to-sat communication is not working, so all of them, will need to be replaced by v3, too
Fair enough. $3.6mm on $2mm--assuming $100,000 per month revenue and $2mm paid up front, which is unrealistically conservative--yields a 22% annualised. Take that out to the increasingly-attained design life of 5 years and it jumps to 25%. To put it bluntly, these are both incredibly high telecom returns.
You've already incorporated launch, maintenance, disposal, et cetera in TCO. So the remainder is customer service (usually 5 to 10% of revenue) and cost of capital. Even assuming 10% WACC, which is on the upper end for a leveraged telecom play, we're still comfortably generating excess return.
Where the comparison fall apart is in respect of fibre. Laying physical infrastructure is hard. You have long periods between capital outlay and return. Also, you have to right scale up front--you can't just launch more birds in a few months as demand scales (or hold them back if it doesn't).
You're not going to replace fibre with Starlink. But the economic case for the latter doesn't fall apart with 20%+ operating returns.
It's crazy to me that people use AI to generate comments for social sites of all things, but here we are.
To be honest, while I took it lightly, others might feel pretty insulted by such claims. De-humanizing someone stinks.
This has nothing to do with profitability. DoD/War Dept contracts are "tax payer money" and shareholders are happy to have those.
>it is actually cheaper to run 10 KILOMETERS / 6 Miles of Fiber cable through the jungle
Cheaper, sure. But try getting this approved in the US through a County Planning Commission. And you did get NEPA/CEQA done too right?
>No, not rural USA. Fiber will be cheaper.
My not-that-rural town has fiber only 80% of town. Houses with city sewer/water don't have fiber
In my ex home town in Germany we had the exact same thing as you are describing - Fiber available everywhere up to 20 meters away from our house, and no chance to get it connected. For purely regulatory reasons.
You don't seem to understand their strategy: Constant replacement is a feature, not a bug, to them.
And in that paradigm, why wait any longer than absolutely necessary with any given launch? The problem is already fixed – at least inter-satellite links seem to be working well enough now (as evidenced by global coverage on the oceans).
> Starlink will never ever be profitable, just as no Sat ISP in history ever has been.
How do you explain the non-zero stock price of e.g. Iridium and Viasat?
> You have to be EXTREMELY remote for Sat internet to make sense. No, not rural USA. Fiber will be cheaper.
Are you sure laying fiber to every last home is really more capital efficient in the long term? Have you done the math on that side too?
And what about mobile coverage? Even solar-powered low maintenance cell stations need to be installed, repaired after storms, have their solar cells dusted off etc.
> No, not Africa. Fiber through the desert will be cheaper. Sat Internet may make sense if you live in the artic or on mount Everest or something like that.
Mount Everest has pretty good cell signal, as far as I know. It's a tiny area, compared to actually remote but still (sparsely) populated regions.
As discussed elsewhere in this thread, the intra-links still do not seem to be enabled. Can not verify myself due not having a yacht and/or time, but I am constantly flying between Asia and Europe with various airlines, and so far none of them have switched to Starlink but keep paying the outrageous pricing from ViaSat & co.
So there is demand :)
> As discussed elsewhere in this thread, the intra-links still do not seem to be enabled. Can not verify myself due not having a yacht and/or time
Are you arguing that everybody reporting successfully using it far away from land is part of some conspiracy? How else would SpaceX get away with claiming that they have global coverage?
> I am constantly flying between Asia and Europe with various airlines, and so far none of them have switched to Starlink but keep paying the outrageous pricing from ViaSat & co.
Installing a new satellite terminal on the outer hull of a commercial aircraft costs millions, including the lost time spent in the hangar, and that's to say nothing about all the required certifications.
That said, Hawaiian Airlines have been using it for a few months now. Seems to be working great, and their routes are also definitely not possible to cover from LEO without inter-satellite links.
The lasers work and I really don't know where you got the idea they don't.
They've worked since at least late 2022.
We're in 2025
As others have pointed out already in this thread: No serious analyst and not even Starlink themselves have claimed to be profitable. They have claimed to be operationally profitable. This means that the cost of operating the sats is lower than the revenue they make. It does leave out all other cost. Yes, if they could build and launch the Sats for free instead of ~$2 million per piece, that could be a profitable business.
Also, have you actually used Starlink? It's crap. Yes, in 2023 when they did not have customers you got decent speeds. Now it's completely overbooked. Yes, you can make a year of profits milking existing customers.
Google "Starlink benchmark" or "Starlink feedback" etc and you will see things like these:
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/starlink.com
At this point Starlink's active customer base is rating their service to be worse than... cancer, I guess?
Yes, for example, via a battery-operated "Mini" terminal a month or so ago in extreme rural Finland, ~1km from the Russian border, while photographing wolves & bears.
It worked great.
Nothing in their analysis is conspiratorial. It's flawed. But not alleging conspiracy.
Let's see what happens once the bubble pops.
What's the bubble? It's cash-flow positive. All of SpaceX is cash-flow positive--they've been buying back their own shares.
You can argue it's overrated, i.e. customers will drop it after trying it for a while. (Or when a recession forces their hand.) But bubble requires leverage and losses, neither of which SpaceX (or Starlink) have.
As for SpaceX, it's pretty much impossible to know their finances - they don't publish audited accounts. We can just trust what Elon is willing to share with us.
Yet 100% put up with the atmospheric pollution of a lot of mass being plasmified on the way back to earth, the light pollution, the lack of other services delivered with that spectrum, etc.
One might ask how the 99.982% of us will be compensated.
It's good to look at the costs vs. benefits of everything, but satellite networks are way far down on my list of concern (and I do some astrophotography).
A strong and trustworthy global democracy to enforce it, and to provide for the general welfare of everyone currently trapped in car-based cities... Is left as a simple exercise to the reader
"Workin' in these coal mines ain't hurt me none no-how."
Last and most importantly, Starlink exists is to create revenue for SpaceX and to fund the Starship program. The value to humanity of Starship succeeding at its goals is extremely high.
Starship to orbit sounds useful, but Starship to Mars is near useless. If that's what rich people want to spend their money on, go nuts.
If humanity agreed with this statement, humanity would fund the program directly through investment, donations or taxes, the same way we fund roads and schools which we also value highly.
I beg to disagree. I see no value at all. This must be one of those accelerationist or extropianist/utilitarian beliefs.
This does not benefit "humanity" at all, even if they do succeed. If a human colony on Mars is established, and all of humanity is wiped out on Earth, does it really benefit "humanity" or only the 0.000000001% of "humanity" located on Mars?
And life on Mars is going to be difficult, it isn't habitable, and is in fact quite hostile to life. I seriously doubt any colony on Mars would be viable long-term. If life on Earth is wiped out, the colony on Mars will very likely wither and die soon after without continued support from Earth.
Any colony on Mars is going to be so exponentially more fragile and fraught with problems for sustaining life, that the suggestion that it's somehow going to save humanity is ridiculous.
It's interesting how if it's anti-elon, it's ok to complain about how the poor are causing the privileged some difficulties.
This is HN, so I should probably look for the data my self...
EDIT:
In 2024 global internet usage grew from 5.3 billion users to 5.5 billion. Starlink grew by only a 1/100 of that in absolute terms, from 2 million users to 4 million over the same time period, majority of users in the USA already had access to the internet via traditional infrastructure.
I tried to find how many StarLink users got internet access (or even high speed internet access) that didn’t have one before, but I couldn’t find the numbers. Somebody could correct me, but I very much doubt that number is high enough to consider StarLink to make even a blimp in providing internet to new users.
EDIT EDIT: I was off by a factor of 100 in initial EDIT, see child post.
This is similar to how the existence of Uber has caused delays or cancellation of public transit projects because politicians were able to say the people were better served with Uber than public transit.
Economic opportunity is largely shifting towards not only having internet access, but performant internet access.
Costs will come down. There will be alternatives.
But they might have taken much longer to come to market without something like this.
I'm not a fanboy, but there's obviously a lot of people who have worked hard to make Starlink a reality.
StarLink provides a great oportunity for politicians to delay or cancel projects which would otherwise have given broadband connection to underserved areas. In urban planning this is known as the Uber effect.
SpaceX is obviously quite profitable. They're obviously spending many billions annually on salaries, Starlink launches and Starship development yet they haven't raised significant money via debt or equity financing rounds in the last few years.
You don't get numbers like that by subsidizing it from the ~$1B/year launch business.
https://www.advanced-television.com/2025/10/01/forecast-8-2m...
That's how SpaceX justifies its launch capabilities. Their strategy of using assembly line techniques to build reusable rockets make no sense unless there is a lot of stuff to launch. Satellites are crazy expensive, and the launch represents only a smaller part of the total budget, so even if the launch was free, there is only so much demand.
Starlink is more than half of SpaceX launches, building their own demand.
And replacing satellites regularly was the plan. I don't know how they did their report, but they certainly budgeted it internally. SpaceX is a private company, they tell you what they want to tell you.
So basically it's not worth worrying about.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#v2_(initial_deploymen...
Vaporized satellites really don't seem like a concern.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichlorodifluoromethane#Enviro...
My point is, Starlink is doing this now, but they are continuing to scale up. Other companies are going to follow. Is there a point that this does become something to worry about because the scale has increased?
If the reentering satellites were somehow transformed entirely into chlorine gas that somehow stayed in the atmosphere forever, we would reach the OSHA permissible exposure limit of 1ppm after 250 years. Chlorine is detectable by smell at 3ppm, which would take 750 years.
It's very likely that the vast majority of the vaporized satellites are inert, as they are basically incinerated on reentry. It's also likely that most of of the vaporized satellite does not stay in the atmosphere for very long. The only way this could be a problem is if the satellites emit a long-lived compound that catalyzes a reaction in the atmosphere, similar to how CFCs destroy the ozone layer. So far, the only candidate for that is aluminum oxide particles, and solid rocket boosters create more of that than reentering satellites. (Fortunately aluminum oxide isn't nearly as bad for the ozone layer as CFCs, and SpaceX does not use solid boosters.)
Also once you are launching tens of thousands of tons to orbit per year, it starts to become feasible to build infrastructure in space. Satellites at the end of their service life contain valuable raw materials. It would likely become cheaper to refurbish or recycle them rather than deorbit and launch new ones.
But, it WILL affect things in climate and atmosphere.
https://csl.noaa.gov/news/2025/427_0428.html
"Pollution" is what this is
Kerosene rockets produce soot. Methalox rockets (like Starship) produce plain CO2 and water.