The Starlink satellite network occupies a large part of the space and that worries some scientists.
These are close encounters of the wrong kind.
In January 2015, Tesla’s CEO (TSLA) – Get a free reportElon Musk announced that his spaceflight company, SpaceX, had submitted documents to place some 4,000 satellites in low-Earth orbit.
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That broadband internet fleet would be known as Starlink and there are currently around 3,600 satellites in operation, representing 50% of the active satellites in orbit.
More recently, on March 29, SpaceX launched the Falcon 9 rocket carrying 56 Starlink satellites blasting off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
This was the 21st for SpaceX in 2023 and the 11th this year dedicated primarily to building the company’s Starlink broadband constellation.
“These large, low-orbiting internet constellations came out of nowhere in 2019 to dominate the space environment in 2023,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA. he said in an interview with Science News.
“It really is a massive shift and massive industrialization of low orbit,” he said.
Increasing number of close passes
And a lot of people have a problem with that.
Hugh Lewis, head of the Astronautics Research Group at the University of Southampton, UK, said space.com that Starlink satellites alone are involved in about 1,600 close encounters between two spacecraft each week, or about 50% of all those incidents.
By comparison, Starlink’s competitor OneWeb, which currently flies over 250 satellites, is involved in 80 close passes with other operators’ satellites every week, according to Lewis’ data.
And the space isn’t getting less crowded. Lewis calculated that once SpaceX launches all 12,000 satellites in its first-generation constellation, Starlink satellites will be involved in 90% of all close approaches.
Lewis said he was concerned that as the number of close passes increases, the risk that operators will eventually make the wrong decision will also grow.
Avoidance maneuvers cost fuel, time and effort, therefore operators always carefully assess such risks.
“In a situation where you’re getting alerts on a daily basis, you can’t maneuver for everything,” Lewis said. “The maneuvers use propellant, the satellite can’t provide service. So there must be some threshold.”
“But that means you’re accepting a certain amount of risk,” he adds. “The problem is, at some point, you’re likely to make the wrong decision.”
Lewis also said that he was concerned about Starlink, as the company is relatively new to the space.
China is coming strong
“Before they were a launch provider, now they’re the largest satellite operator in the world, but they’ve only been doing it for two years, so there’s some inexperience.”
NASA said more than 27,000 pieces of orbital debris, or “space junk,” are tracked by sensors in the Defense Department’s global Space Surveillance Network (SSN).
Much more debris exists in the near-Earth space environment, which the agency says is too small to track but large enough to threaten human spaceflight and robotic missions.
There have only been three confirmed orbital collisions so far, but people are still upset. And it looks like the final frontier will soon have more visitors.
South China Morning Mail reported last month that China plans to build a huge network of satellites in near-Earth orbit to provide Internet services to users around the world and stifle Starlink.
The project is codenamed “GW,” according to a team led by Associate Professor Xu Can of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) University of Space Engineering in Beijing.
The GW constellation will include 12,992 satellites owned by the newly established China Satellite Network Group Co.
Meanwhile, Musk, who predicted that “humanity will reach Mars in its lifetime,” said earlier this month that SpaceX will be ready to launch the massive Starship rocket in a few weeks.
