Animation 10k Starlink Satellites
spaceweather.com10,000 Starlink satellites orbiting the Earth?? I didn't know there were so many, really so many.
Their presence has already radically transformed the orbital environment.
There are so many that in 2025 alone they performed around 300,000 collision avoidance maneuvers.
In short: on the one hand, they're convenient for us because of their fantastic internet connection, but on the other, they're generating truly unprecedented artificial traffic in space.
All this worries me a little.
You shouldn't be worried about it, these satellites are in Low Earth Orbits that readily decay if the satellites don't regularly reboost themselves using their electric thrusters. And performing collision avoidance maneuvers is just part of how they're designed to work. Note that its 300,000 avoidances, not collisions. These are more like ballerinas than careening billiard balls.
True, but at scale of 10k, chances of collision due to malfunction are not 0.
Nobody says the chance of a collisions is zero. That's why it being in LEO is relevant. Internet fools who just get scared by the big number without considering the details of the situation always get this wrong.
And so what if they collide? This isn’t Kessler syndrome territory, it’s low enough orbit that debris would re-enter and burn up rapidly. You’d lose the colliding satellites, and that’s likely all.
Not that there has been a single starlink collision, but y’know.
> Not that there has been a single starlink collision
How sure are you that that would be made public?
Would it be always observed and caught outside of SpaceX?
If not, is that proof that if there such collisions they don't matter?
There are a great many eyes on the sky, and you can’t hide stuff up there - even every secret military satellite is known and tracked - so something as substantial as a collision would likely be known about before it even happens, as ephemera don’t change without an input.
Imagine a threat actor blowing up one or two of them. Or malfunction leading to collision with a launcher. Or any satellite malfunction and failure to de-orbit in time.
Remember MAD, mutual assured distraction? Well we created another one for access to space
What I found so fascinating about starling is how easy it was for a single country, even a single company in this case, to pollute near-earth space.
I understand the mechanics of LEO, and the de-orbit mechanics put in place. But the world-wide impact, unknown side-effects on the upper layers of atmosphere on the re-entry of literally thousands of satellites within fairly short period of time?
On a bad year, there might be a few hundred tons of Starlink satellites reentering the atmosphere. In the same year, there will be something like 5000 tons of meteors reentrying, and if you include space dust that radars don't see, you're looking at a few times more than that.
This appeal to scary ignorance to poop on a technology is a cynical reflex. Instead of just saying that a bare number with no context scares you, you should dig deeper and try to actually back up or invalidate your fears.
You're low by a factor of three.
You probably could make the same point in a better way as well.