Just over a year ago, the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket plummeted back to the ground after delivering 23 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit.
It was a routine mission, one out of hundreds of rocket launches that have delivered just shy of 10,000 broadband-beaming satellites total into space — and it belched a massive cloud of lithium and other pollutants roughly 62 miles over Europe upon its uncontrolled return, as scientists detailed in a new paper published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
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