Hacker News Reader

There is some evidence to suggest that spacex knows how to reenter an object without burning it up.

Sometimes without even meaning to:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/spacex-cbc-debris-s...

The engineering overlap between between a small object designed for reentry and a flying (crashing...) warehouse is not a circle.

Once upon a time there was a bonkers "rods from god" mass bomb idea, but that didn't work either.

I think it's actually the other way around, satellites need to be specifically designed to burn up fast in the atmosphere. See for example the warnings about space debris from Chinese satellites not designed with this in mind.

100 tons of steel will not vaporize before it hits the ground