[aledevv]

10,000 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.

[mikkupikku]

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.

[user32489318]

True, but at scale of 10k, chances of collision due to malfunction are not 0.

[mikkupikku]

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.

[rob74]

So, because the 10,000+ Starlinks launched so far (and the countless future satellites Bezos and others want to launch for their own constellations) are in LEO, nothing bad can happen (it can only good happen)?

That is, if you disregard the following quote from the article:

> Each re-entry deposits about 30 kg of aluminum oxide into the upper atmosphere--an uncontrolled chemistry experiment on a planetary scale.

[mikkupikku]

The bad that can happen is limited by it being in LEO. If these were MEO sats but 50x fewer (Bezos sats BTW) you wouldn't be whining about it even though the potential debris would last thousands of years instead of less than ten. And appealing to the fear of the unknown is little more than motivated reasoning, the amount of rocks and rock dust entering the atmosphere dwarfs Starlink reentries.

[krunck]

Rock dust ≠ AlO

"Aluminum oxide compounds generated by the entire population of satellites reentering the atmosphere in 2022 are estimated at around 17 metric tons. Reentry scenarios involving mega-constellations point to over 360 metric tons of aluminum oxide compounds per year, which can lead to significant ozone depletion."

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL10...

[madaxe_again]

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.

[jacquesm]

> 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?

[karlgkk]

> How sure are you that that would be made public?

Extremely sure. There are both numerous private, academic, and governmental agencies that are constantly searching for both collision paths, and collision debris.

The debris cloud alone would generate an extremely visible signature.

> Would it be always observed and caught outside of SpaceX?

Yes.

[jacquesm]

Thank you for the answer.

[madaxe_again]

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.

[jacquesm]

Thank you for the answer. I'm aware of the degree of coverage over land but I was wondering about the ocean side of things as well.

[LightBug1]

Wait until multiple, non-coordinated copy-cat constellations are sent up there ...

[mikkupikku]

Large operators like SpaceX and OneWeb do coordinate with each other. Ground based radar tracking data from the government is also made available to operators, and SpaceX has developed their own optical space-based detection system (Stargaze) which makes data available to other operators as well.

There's a lot of money in this stuff, lot's of planning. It's being managed by competent people who give a shit.

[homebrewer]

It's an LLM spambot, it is incapable of worrying. I'm much more worried about another instance of nobody noticing what they're replying to.

[jampekka]

E.g. gowinston.ai gives 98% probability that the comment is human written. LLM detectors of course aren't always correct, but generally their detection performance for pure LLM text can be high (accuracy % in high 90s).

Do you have some specific techniques or strategies for LLM text detection? Have you validated them?

[ohyoutravel]

No no their profile says “software dev.”

[21asdffdsa12]

Software decentralized evolved version ?

[birdsongs]

Can I ask how you're so certain? The first two sentences reads human-typed to me.

[snarfy]

2 days from a Kessler syndrome

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b66ZZ05wKC0

[simondotau]

Kessler syndrome doesn’t apply at that low altitude.

[user32489318]

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

[wongarsu]

> Or any satellite malfunction and failure to de-orbit in time

Last year they had one "dead as a doornail" Starlink satellite in space. [1] It's v1.5, so deployed sometime between 2021 and 2023. It should be naturally deorbited from atmospheric drag by now.

There was also the other Starlink satellite with a tank rupture last December [2]

A low number of dead satellites isn't an issue as the other satellites can steer around it. Their orbit also quickly decays to a level where it's below the orbital plane of the other satellites. The real danger is if a large enough number malfunction that they start colliding with each other at high speeds

1: https://starlink.com/public-files/Starlink_Approach_to_Satel...

2: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/satellites/a-spacex-...

[user32489318]

A satellite of that magnitude can have many failure modes, onboard computer will do their best to de-orbit if it encounters unrecoverable failure: it can use thrusters, it can change attitude to increase surface area towards the sun or the atmosphere, rearrange solar panels etc etc. Assisted de-orbit it can be done very quickly. Unassisted de-orbit will take some time. This is a known and solved problem, we have been relying on this for many years. This is what you’re referring to with your links.

What I’m trying to communicate is that if s/c fails in a non-recoverable way, thruster stuck on, pierced propellant tank, adcs failing in a specific way (e.g. you can get unlucky and get particular bit-flipped that pass checksum etc etc), it is theoretically possible to end up in a non-recoverable state. For example: accelerate into an elliptical orbit or due to orbit perturbation catch-up with your neighbors (all of which will need to do orbital maneuvers and waste propellants). This stuff happens. I’m no longer in this field, but my team lost university satellite because of this. Everyone hopes for a nice decay orbit but it can get funky, and very very hard to model.

Lastly, there’re cases where satellites have been destroyed on purpose. Look up Chinese and Russian tests. The debris field produces for this is hard to model, it will propagate and react to solar winds, upper atmosphere disturbances, neighboring objects,.. Small particles pierce through everything. You will not see them, you will not be able to track them.

[21asdffdsa12]

The russians threatened that if they were not given access to starlink? And china has musk by the balls via tesla.. at this level states treat cooperations like servants for everyone including threatening to beat them mercilessly.

[seydor]

while most of LEO satellites are already probably used for military purposes, they are not subject to MAD deterrence, but probably one of the first easy targets should war erupt

[gosub100]

Space is big. Really, really big.

[simondotau]

Even with 10,000 satellites, any one satellite is probably going to be 100 miles away from the next nearest satellite.

[Pay08]

No, we wouldn't.