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[–]magnora7[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

No we don't have a way to take out space debris unfortunately.

But one of the things about these 12k starlink satellites is that they're 1/50th the altitude of normal geostationary satellites, which means they have low ping, but it also means they have a bit of drag against the atmosphere. So they have to use ion thrusters to slowly push the satellites away from earth to keep them in stable orbit. This also means that if they stop functioning, the average time for it to return to earth and burn up on reentry, is just 3 months. So if the whole starlink system broke down entirely, it'd all burn up within 3 months. This helps reduce the amount of space debris.

However increasing the overall amount of satellites by 7x is going to still create a lot of junk... but hopefully this 3 month limit will help keep that more controlled than it would be otherwise.