[rzimmerman]

This article is sensationalizing pretty hard. SpaceX is doing a great job automating conjunction planning. If you run a collision model on their 1000s of satellites over a several day period, you'll find many potential collisions ("conjunctions"). But remember the probability on these is abysmally low - less than 1/100,000 or less than 10^-6. And these are conservative upper bounds. But thousands and thousands of those add up to an uncomfortably high probability over years of operation.

So SpaceX does a smart, responsible thing here. They make a course adjustment if the probability is above a small threshold (probably 10^-5). From my understanding this is all automated. It's not a "swerve" or an emergency. Their satellite simply needs to adjust its normal orbit-keeping thrust a small amount at some point in the next 12-24 hours. It's table-stakes for constellation management at this point. Planet does the same tracking with their 100-200 Dove satellites.

Additionally, SpaceX and other operators like Planet have higher fidelity tracking data than the USSF's radar data (available at https://www.space-track.org with a free account or through https://celestrak.org). They publish their tracking data for other operators (https://ephemerides.planet-labs.com). Having lower error-bounds reduces the number of potential collisions that need to be avoided and tracked.

Inflammatory language like this is frustrating because it feeds an emotional "have you heard about Kessler Syndrome!?!" gut response. Many people and VCs have been duped into spending time on exotic stuff like harpoon capture and trash collecting satellites. But the answer, to anyone who actually works on this problem and does any research, is already there. What SpaceX and Planet are doing is responsible. Debris mitigation agreements and deorbit timeline restrictions from the FCC/other bodies are enough. If someone truly does launch 10-100k satellites, there are great solutions available with defined orbital bands.

If SpaceX had done 0 of these maneuvers it's unlikely anything bad would have happened. But they're doing the right thing here. And Starlink satellites are very low and don't stick around as junk when they're not being used. Basically, the tone here should be "wow SpaceX does a great job with automating collision avoidance", not "satellites constantly swerving in space".