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They’ll be in low orbit, so they deorbit on their own in months/years due to atmospheric drag. The ISS requires regular boosting for this reason.

44 in one launch is very doable. They’ve done 64 in a launch before: https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2018-12-spacex-sa...

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Non-AMP: https://phys.org/news/2018-12-spacex-satellites.html

>> carrying 15 micro-satellites and 49 CubeSats

IANASJ (I am not a space junkie) but this makes those ones sound unusually tiny and brings me back to the first question - are the Starlink birds similarly sized?

Most people on r/spacex are guesstimating that each falcon 9 will launch 25 satellites. 44 has been discounted because many think the falcon 9s fairing will be volume limited when launching that many satellites.

That being said, no official number has been given out by spacex so this is all guesswork and this article did not cite a source for the "44 satellites per launch".

SpaceX's two test Starlink satellites were of the "micro-satellite" size, which typically means sub-100kg: https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/microsat-2.htm

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