> In a statement posted on social media late Dec. 12, Michael Nicolls, vice president of Starlink engineering at SpaceX, said a satellite launched on a Kinetica-1 rocket from China two days earlier passed within 200 meters of a Starlink satellite.
> CAS Space, the Chinese company that operates the Kinetica-1 rocket, said in a response that it was looking into the incident and that its missions “select their launch windows using the ground-based space awareness system to avoid collisions with known satellites/debris.” The company later said the close approach occurred nearly 48 hours after payload separation, long after its responsibilities for the launch had ended.
> The satellite from the Chinese launch has yet to be identified and is listed only as “Object J” with the NORAD identification number 67001 in the Space-Track database. The launch included six satellites for Chinese companies and organizations, as well as science and educational satellites from Egypt, Nepal and the United Arab Emirates.
> In a statement posted on social media late Dec. 12, Michael Nicolls, vice president of Starlink engineering at SpaceX, said a satellite launched on a Kinetica-1 rocket from China two days earlier passed within 200 meters of a Starlink satellite.
> CAS Space, the Chinese company that operates the Kinetica-1 rocket, said in a response that it was looking into the incident and that its missions “select their launch windows using the ground-based space awareness system to avoid collisions with known satellites/debris.” The company later said the close approach occurred nearly 48 hours after payload separation, long after its responsibilities for the launch had ended.
> The satellite from the Chinese launch has yet to be identified and is listed only as “Object J” with the NORAD identification number 67001 in the Space-Track database. The launch included six satellites for Chinese companies and organizations, as well as science and educational satellites from Egypt, Nepal and the United Arab Emirates.
> 48 hours after payload separation, long after its responsibilities for the launch had ended
This is funny, the way things are just discarded in space, not our problem anymore vs. deorbit
I think this is more that the offending satellite was at that point the responsibility of the satellite operator, not the launch operator.
I think they are saying "this is not on us, this is on the sat operator". Which may or may not be true, who knows.
If you get hit by a car 5 minutes after you get let off at a bus stop it isn't the bus drivers fault.
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And what the goal of that maneuver was.
It seems like it deliberately came close to the Starlink sat, but the "why" is still a good question.
Weapons test springs to mind, or as a sibling comment suggested a test of Starlink response capabilities.
How confident are we the intent was nefarious? Do you ever see accidental near-misses with this type of flight profile?
A test of SpaceX's awareness & response would be ample reason.
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Cause problems and deny it