Comment by aledevv
5 days ago
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.
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.
True, but at scale of 10k, chances of collision due to malfunction are not 0.
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.
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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.
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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.
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?
No no their profile says “software dev.”
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Can I ask how you're so certain? The first two sentences reads human-typed to me.
2 days from a Kessler syndrome
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b66ZZ05wKC0
Kessler syndrome doesn’t apply at that low altitude.
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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
> 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-...
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.
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.
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
Space is big. Really, really big.
Even with 10,000 satellites, any one satellite is probably going to be 100 miles away from the next nearest satellite.
No, we wouldn't.