I wonder how much rare earth material will get incinerated over the next few decades with thousands of these things burning up annually. Hope we figure out space mining quick.
Rare earth elements actually aren't that rare. For example, neodymium makes up over 30 ppm of Earth's crust. That's more common than lead, cobalt, tin, thorium, tungsten, molybdenum, and quite a few other elements with large-scale industrial applications.
The difficult part of producing rare-earth elements is separating them from everything else. Tiny pieces of spacecraft dust scattered over a large area don't make very high grade ore...
Rare earth elements are so named because their earths are rare: there aren't many places on the crust where their concentration is significantly above the average. Mining depends on the existence of mineral earths.
But all the components of an iPhone can technically be recycled to one degree or another (even if they aren't at present). Once a satellite has been incinerated, that's it. And there will be thousands of these, and several providers. That's thousands and thousands of pounds of material disappearing for good, every year.
1. very little rare earth materials are actually used. 80%+ are in magnets / motors, a good chunk in screens and sensors
2. solar panels might have cadmium/silver which despite the name are not rare at all
440g is the average amount used in a modern car. Let’s extrapolate to 1Kg for a satellite. Earth has an estimated 120 million metric tons of rare earth deposits. If you start burning ten thousand of those satellites every year, it will take twelve million years to go through the stock.
Not really. You know what happens when a satellite burns up in the atmosphere? Hint: It's not a nuclear reaction. All the components end up back on earth (just vaporized and oxidized).
