In the 21st century, private companies began to launch satellites at unprecedented rates. Today, Earth’s orbit is packed with thousands of satellites and fragments – around 32,000 in total – all circling the planet at immense speed. This is even after accounting for the fact that a lot of satellites have fallen out of orbit and been destroyed.
Some reports suggest that by the end of this decade there could more than 60,000 active satellites in space. Launch by launch, what began with a handful of scientific and military spacecraft has accelerated into a constant flow of objects, publicly and privately owned, placed into different orbital lanes, each serving a variety of purposes.
There is now a diverse collection of satellites spinning around the globe, including communication and weather satellites, navigation satellites and Earth observation technology that takes images of the surface.
The surge in orbital activity has created a significant collision risk. There have already been crashes, including a 2009 event where a US satellite hit a defunct Russia military satellite. Tens of thousands of tiny fragments of metal are now spinning at high velocities.
The big fear is that future collisions will cause a domino effect where Earth’s orbit becomes cluttered with tiny, high-speed bits of metal. That could create a near-impenetrable layer of debris that would make space launches so dangerous it would essentially trap humans on Earth.
All these megaconstellation plans have big plans of scaling up exponentially, and that means the clock is constantly creepinc closer. At some point a strong enough solar flare could cause a long enough comms blackout.
But the main thing with the clock is that it also displays how often corrective maneuvers are needed. The more maneuvers are being made, the higher the chance of errors. I think that’s the real danger here. Starlink is scaling up massively and they have numerous competitors, including China. All it takes is a miscommunication and the snowball of kessler syndrome might start rolling.
Yeah, and that’s the core of the Kessler Syndrome issue. Right now, if everything goes well you still have 3 days to get the maneuvers in before stuff starts crashing. But, screw up once and now there’s even more space debris and the window to make those maneuvers gets even smaller. Eventually even if you have full control of the remaining satellites, there are so many collisions happening that you can’t get maneuvers to them fast enough before there are more cascading collisions.
And, recent events showed that you don’t even need a collision. A Starlink satellite just blew up this week on its own. Who knows what happened, but where there used to be 1 satellite they’re now tracking one object surrounded by a bunch of debris.