Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by HackerThemAll 18 days ago
I can't wait until this junk starts to collide and blocks us from making any space flights. This has to happen and probability grows with the square of the number of orbiting satellites.
1 comments

People seem to have a poor understanding of just how much space there is up there. It's just very empty up there. And these things are in precisely controlled orbits that are well documented, etc. Even if you simplify your thinking of orbits to a 2D (square area), it's a lot of space.

But that would be a mistake of course. Low earth orbit is three dimensional. Star Link uses several altitude bands of about 20-30km each. It's 330-360km for the v3 satellites. The volume of that is about 17 billion cubic kilometers. About 13x the volume of all the water in the oceans. Accidental collisions are not going to be a frequent thing. These things are going to be many kilometers apart.

> Even if you simplify your thinking of orbits to a 2D (square area), it's a lot of space.

This is not a spatial problem. It's an intersectionality problem.

While you're correct when it comes to calculations, you certainly underestimate the ability for humans to destroy everything around them.