Given Musk’s predilections about matters environmental, I hope he’s pondering that. With that many satellites in orbit, one wonders about dispersing that much mass of metals and burned propellant in the atmosphere.
Letting them burn up in reentry does seem wasteful given the rare earths involved. One also wonders if reprocessing them on the moon would save money. Just think of how easy it would be to operate a vacuum furnace!
A small nuclear reactor and an arc furnace should work well.
Getting ingots back to earth might be a challenge.
“One also wonders if reprocessing them on the moon would save money. “
Ask AI what the Delta V from LEO to even high lunar orbit is. That will be your answer.
Remember it took a Saturn V sized rocket to put a small lunar lander and orbiter around the moon. Only stage 1 and 2 were dropped back to earth the HUGE stage 3 was uses just to toss the CM and lander to barely lunar orbit. From there the CM had it’s own large engine and was mostly fuel itself, same for the lander.
The rocket equation is a bitch of a mistress.
The best place to service them is and will always be slightly higher earth orbits at a space station co-located at its inclination plane angle so high Delta V plane change burns are not needed.
Course Starship is designed to land with payloads you could bring them back into a small cluster and use a robotic arm to grab them and put them back into starships hold. It’s always going to be cheaper to burn them up over the Pacific drop zone. These birds don’t have tonnes pun intended of REE silicon , aluminum are numbers 2 and 3 behind oxygen we will never be short on any of those. The chips have silver and gold but in micrograms for connections, some tin too. Solar panels use micrograms worth of boron and phosphorus for the P&N dopants again we are standing on a silica based world silicon is unlimited. So is aluminum, iron,magnesium, calcium too even titanium is 0.565% of total crustal mass that’s an unimaginably large number of tonnes worth.
Also it’s not like the metals.disappear they settle out into the Ocean singular and reenter the rock cycle as sediments on the seabed. Only hydrogen and helium have escape velocities to leave earth’s gravity well. Everything else falls back eventually to the bottom of said gravity well if in low earth orbit.