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by chris_va 143 days ago
What your describing is called Kessler Syndrome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

... It is a very real possibility, but less of a problem below 550km altitude because the decay time is much shorter (and why all of these mega constellations tend to stay at lower altitude, even though ~1000km is generally better for a communications satellite).
1 comments
JumpCrisscross 143 days ago
> It is a very real possibility

It's really not. Not in the popularly-portrayed manner. Militaries have been researching how to intentionally cause such a cascade in even a limited orbit. To my knowledge, there isn't a solution.

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chris_va 142 days ago
It's a very real possibility, it's just a very slow exponential.

If you have 100,000 satellites, and each collision produces 50,000 pieces of shrapnel with some distribution of altitudes and atmospheric drag, it's not that hard to do the math. The cinematic portrayal of cascading failure (ala the movie Gravity) is completely insane, but that doesn't mean this isn't a real problem on a 100 year timescale.

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JumpCrisscross 142 days ago
> If you have 100,000 satellites, and each collision produces 50,000 pieces of shrapnel with some distribution of altitudes and atmospheric drag, it's not that hard to do the math

One, it is. And two, you need insane distributions to get over the energy requirements of plane changes.

> on a 100 year timescale

Irrelevant in LEO.

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