Comment by NitpickLawyer
8 hours ago
> 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.
unless the sat operator is sueing for a refund because they were put in the wrong orbit... its the sat operator.
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.
Yeah while I didn't directly mention it, I'm referring to stages being discarded in space by a specific party
Nah, in this case the driver is the person who gets off and goes and bumps into another person.