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I had to check, but you're not wrong - only 47% of total are controlled re-entries. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_cemetery#cite_note-...)

I thought I recently read about a law requiring a de-orbit plan for anything launched. I would assume if most of the mass doesn't burn up (Starlinks mostly burn up), it would require them to hit the South Pacific patch or similar.




That is closer than I expected, and is specifically 47% of the re-entry mass (which is what we care about here) is from controlled. I would expect if you were just looking at # of satellites the numbers would be much more skewed as lots of little satellites would probably burn up and its the big ones that we need to worry about surviving to the ground.




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