Oh thank God... We almost had to use the metric system there didn't we?
this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2026
250 points (92.2% liked)
Technology
84199 readers
3325 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
We were within a hair's breadth of that awful fate.
within a hair's breadth
squints eyes
No, smaller, actually. A squint is 17.76 hair's breadths
Are all imperial hair bigger, or only Texas ones?
We almost had to mention standard cars, which are also half the size.
Americans don't drive cars, so they don't know how big they might be.
A car?? Is that some kind of libural version of my furd f300000 king ranch pedestrian killer edition truck?
load more comments
(3 replies)
Half the size of a pickup truck? So like, a normal car?
More like 1/3 the size of a zambonie. Or 11/3 the size of two penguins on a foosball table.
Whats that in Rhode Islands? And how about mass, can I get that measured in bigmacs?
It's over 9,000 bigmacs. This is what the ruling class does instead of feeding us. That's over 9,000 bigmacs in waste. Per loss. Just flame broiling in the atmosphere instead of going to where it would help the most.
129 / 4.307213e+10 = 2.9949761 x 10^-9
That's in sq ft. Rounded. Length x width of a pickup truck divided by surface area of Rhode Island as reported on Wikipedia
How many dachshunds is that?
Eighteen Danny DeVitos
1200 raccoon peens, Rp.
Is the measure in Imperial pick ups,
or metric pick ups?
Cochem mentioned! 😍
How does half a pickup truck compare to a large boulder the size of a small boulder?
Large boulder is a state of mind. It achieved an awful lot that day and was feeling especially pleased with itself thus the honorific.
Yep, they are in Low Earth Orbit. A place that has a very, very small amount of air, so the satellites experience drag, lose speed, eventually the propellant tanks run dry, and they burn up in the atmosphere. The ISS experiences the same thing, which is why its altitude slowly falls, then you see a sharp increase as they push to a slightly higher orbit.
At the altitude the SpaceX satellites are at, they only passively stay up for a few years. With the onboard propulsion giving them each another few years.
Please let one land on my house so I can sue SpaceX and retire early.
"act of God", legalese for "fuck you".
One fell in a farmer's field in Saskatchewan. Dude got a hassle, some publicity, and a nominal fee of a grand or something.
edit: here's a mastodon thread where astronomer Sam Lawler lives nearby and visits the site with media:
It wasn't from a starlink satellite though.
which the U.S. aerospace company SpaceX later admitted was part of a cargo trunk for its Crew Dragon spacecraft.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I don't remember that happening. I would actually be surprised if a satellite would survive reentry with basically anything left of it. If you want to return something from orbit you need heat shield or you're not getting it back.
Even the ISS is expected to completely burn up and that's much higher mass than a starlink satellite
A grand? Then I'm keeping it. I can make more as a roadside tourist attraction. Or maybe I sell it to the Chinese or Bezos or something. You want your toy back, Musk? Pay up, you cheap bastard!
Privatizing space sure did make things more efficient, puh-raise JEE-zuz-ah!
Complaining about Kressler Syndrome
Complaining about Starlink
Pick one, asshole. As shitty as Musk is, Starlink is in too low of an orbit to cause Kressler Syndrome
Every time somebody mentions Kessler syndrome they always seem to forget that low earth orbit is an area literally bigger than the earth's surface. There's about 10,000 of them and they are spread out over an area bigger than the surface of the earth. Meanwhile there are way more than 10,000 trucks in the world and apparently they are twice the size, and yet there are huge swaths of land that do not currently have a truck on them. I think we'll be okay.
Although I do accept they are probably irritating for astronomers.
Collisions aren't theoretical, near misses are so common that there's an entire department at NASA dedicated to detecting them and warning satellite owners to adjust course, I know because we were contacted about a possible collision involving our cubesat. Prior to megaconstellations being deployed if humanity stopped adjusting satellite orbits there would be a collision within a month, now there would be a collision within 5 days. It's only a matter of time until both satellites on a collision course don't have the ability to adjust course (engine failure or no propulsion/fuel/comms). In the event of a Carrington-style solar flare there's a good chance a decent percentage of satellites would be knocked out, making this hypothetical into a reality. Further, we can only currently track objects down to about 10cm, but NASA estimates suggest about 500,000 objects exist between 1-10cm in size in LEO.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(7 replies)
Where I live, we have pickup trucks half the size of pickup trucks.
Half the size of a pickup truck… a Mazda compact, or a jacked up GMC Hemi half ton?
Even just saying Ford F150 gives a lot of leeway.
load more comments
(2 replies)
How many bananas is that?
DDG/Lucille Bluth says about 40,000-50,000 bananas.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Is this not part of the plan. I seem to recall they are designed to entirely burn up on reentry.
Yeah this is by design. Beats the alternative of having every starlink satellite ever launched hanging around low Earth orbit long after it stops working.
Yeah
There could be cubes the size of gorillas.
Yeah that's what happens to absolutely everything in Low Earth Orbit in just a few years. Well, unless you keep pushing them back up like we do to the International Space Station.
These satellites are doing exactly what they're intended to do. These are actually pretty small satellites overall, there are a lot up there quite a bit larger that deorbit and burn up on re-entry just fine as well.
That's part of the reason things are sent to LEO specifically, because their orbits naturally degrade and they naturally deorbit themselves without needing any assistance or fuel. It also means if a satellite in LEO fails quicker than planned, is put in an incorrect orbit due to a launch issue, or just failed prematurely, it will fail-safe and deorbit without any assistance.
return to sender
preferably on his head
That would be so hilarious. People would be drinking beer and laughing at the story 100 years later.
view more: next ›