Fascinating stuff, Ricky, thanks for posting.
To me it looks like there is a risk we could read too much into this though, resulting in us becoming complacent with other things that we do have control over, and absolutely must act on, to avoid catastrophe.
Musk's satellites were always doomed to fail early beacause they were never radiation hardened, unlike traditional satellites. It would have been impossible to do at profit, radiation hardening is a very expensive process, recalling also that the energy in profit is declining, making all possibilities of profit ever more difficult, as time goes on, since extracted energy availabilty peaked around the seventies (It's related to difficulty of extraction - as the latter increases, it impacts all margins, because all energy in all profit is extracted from the planet)
This is why all safety, reliability, and quality functions have been progressively cut in all kinds of manufacture and work associated with all things, at least manufacture done by "The West", and it's why we already lost some of the technical icons of those heady days when oil was at maximum availability.
Concorde (Supersonic commercial passenger flight), and space shuttle (reusable spacecraft), are two of the highly beneficial things lost, but there are many more.
Now we (the West) have probably also lost traditional radiation hardened satellites, and we are struggling to keep even budget air flights flying without the doors falling off.
Boeing, a company at the forefront of the Aerospace industry in the West are noted for more or less leading the charge to throw all long established safety processes to the wind, there were all kinds of regulations associated with software and system safety that have been smashed by mixing Boeing employees with FAA safety inspection functions formerly reserved to be carried out by government personnel, it is awash in corruption, and already resulted in things including the repeatedly fatal crashes of 737 Max, and the doors falling off of others in flight.
I know about all this because I worked in aerospace and all related systems including energy at a high level throughout my time, as a Systems Engineer, and in all the other roles Ive done as part of that. In that caoacity we deal with the systems of business processes as well as the technical systems that fly, communicate, and sometimes go bang, on land, on water, underwater, in the sky, in space, in orbit.
Anyhow, Musk and Starlink will know by now their satellites will fail early, they will already have a much higher rate of attrition than was predicted by profit driven analyses during the business case, when that was very hastily drawn up, as a knee jerk reaction to the news that Huawei were nearing completion of their twenty year 5G efforts. The US did not want China to lead 5G, so they put up Starlink as "Competition". Musk would have quickly convinced the already weakened (Expert drained) government / NATO that Starlink was a great idea, and here we are. I know many veteran satellite comms systems experts, as well as me, who were no longer employed in the business, who were horrified to hear of the plans of Starlink for many reasons, Starlink literally had no idea of the risk they were taking with Starlink, now so many rules have been broken, Starlink has to end in disaster, this is a statistical certainty.
Similarly, the disasters of Boeing were predicted and warned about by the many Engineers who exited the system, sometimes in protest, at the safety corners being cut by Boeing and others intent to maintain profit at all cost, even the cost of many lives in repeated disastrous crashes by the same aircraft, blighted by fundamental design faults, which would never been approved by the business processes safety system which had been compromised (D0178B/C) partly by exchanging personnel between govt and company positions.
If you read Cory doctrow, you'll know what Enshittification means, though Cory has a slightly different definition of it than me, it's his term, but I extend it, same way as I relate it to, and extend Graeber's bullshit jobs to bullshit industry, writing my own stories in the latter, all of it is where profit starts to take precedence over human lives, and is therefore no longer fit for purpose. Hence why I question it, and find it responsible for an awful lot more evil than is known mainstream. Profit is ending the planet, unchecked, this is where it has to go, complete with genocide which will engulf us, whilst the planet burns.
I can't say that strongly enough. I challenge anyone to identify bad news which does not trace directly to profit.
I read not long ago that Starlink had come up with the expected get-out clause of the system not being robust, knowing they can blame failure on sun flares when it turns to sh*t as it will, sunbursts or no sunbursts.
The technical explanation of how the atmosphere somehow conducts electrical currents to make it more dense sounds highly suspect to me, a little like how the fiction of a thermal blanket associated with the atmosphere is just rubbish, because the atmosphere is adiabatic, physically not capable of supporting any blanket effect, but the idea of a blanket effect was needed to cover up that the damage we are doing is not because of oil alone, it's actually because of profit. Profit is the energy lie at the root of it all, and it is a live thing that can be so devious, as to cover it's tracks the way it does, using us as it's unwitting energy slaves.
I would be interested to read whatever scientific materials there are on the atmosphere density / conduction theory, I hope they might be open source but I but I bet they are not, again it's all to satisfy the profit monster, all the research will have been funded by profit driven companies, if not Starlink direct, because only they have the funds to do the research, and they have an agenda to produce a particular dialog, and it's not about saving the planet or people, it's about saving the reputation of Starlink, in order that starlink might continue feeding the profit monster.
On the profit monster, it's an emergent property, a learned behaviour associated with the collective of us, all acting individually and in all tribes for profit, because we have no choice, we are it's energy slaves, until we can inject energy from the only source that can supply the latter without profit (Profit being energy extracted from the planet), this is the enetgy of the sun.
There I hope you see the irony.
The energy of the sun is the solution to all our problems.
But by focusing on the harmful effects the sun, there is a danger we could start to see it as the enemy, when actually it's our savior.
The profit monster is our real enemy, it's the one driving us to see the energy of the sun as something harmful, when actually it's our only way out from Armageddon.
Until we put this right, the only way we can, by conducting the energy of the sun being received by all solar farms to all people, by way of money generated directly from solar energy, each token displaying honestly the KWhrs solar that created the token, to all people FOC, this being a generous UBI for all people, removing the need of all to continue in the system of energy slavery, we are as doomed as the ants in a population of ants that has run out of food.
The emergent property that controls them in that circumstance drives them to literally consume one another.
We have seen this also in human history.
But this time the planet is burning, all living things must consume each other. This time is different. This time none will survive, if we can't make the required change.
We need to issue solar indexed stimulus with no further delay, sunbursts or no sunbursts.
The sun is screaming this at us, this is what it is really saying;
"Use me, or burn"
Using it means monetising it, the same way as plants do by nutrients, conducting the Joules / KWhrs receivef by their leaves to all of life needing it.