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by some_bird 169 days ago
Ah yes, Kessler's space shredder, something to be feared by all satellites!

It appears that we are very close to an unstoppable runaway process of collisions in space. On one hand, nice that we prevent rich guys from running away to other planets after ruining this one. On the other hand, a lot of services require GPS, it would be chaos if that were to disappear...
3 comments
m4rtink 169 days ago
Starlinks are in self cleaning orbits & are actually being moved even lower due to solar minimum & better capacity:

https://www.space.com/space-exploration/satellites/spacex-lo...

And any weaponized junk schrapnel a DiY iranian ASAP missile would deploy would be sub-orbital and would all come down in a couple minutes.

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lxgr 168 days ago
> On one hand, nice that we prevent rich guys from running away to other planets

Kessler syndrome has little to no effect on trajectories only briefly transiting any given orbital shell. The collision probability of anything going straight "up"/"out" is negligible.

> On the other hand, a lot of services require GPS

GPS is in MEO, Starlink is in LEO. There's absolutely no chance any material will be propelled up to MEO via a series of even very unlucky LEO collisions, as far as I know.

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octoberfranklin 169 days ago
GPS is in geosynchronous orbit, insanely far from the Earth's surface.

You can't get chain-reaction collisions to happen at such an outrageously high orbit. That amount of mass you'd have to put into orbit is just insane. It's like trying to crash the moon.

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wat10000 169 days ago
Nitpick, GPS is about halfway to geosync. Your point stands.
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