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Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

Explicitly so by the outer space treaty.

Not that these launches are launching trash, or launching very much in the grand scheme of things either.

How many satellites currently orbit the earth? Aren’t they planning to launch a thousand or two? That’s a pretty substantial amount of things!

There are currently roughly 5000 satellites in orbit (per wikipedia). I don't have good stats on those 5000 satellites but I believe they are on average substantially bigger than the starlink satellites.

Either way, a few thousand things spread out over the surface area of the earth is practically nothing.

> Either way, a few thousand things spread out over the surface area of the earth is practically nothing.

and the surface of a sphere at the altitude they're orbiting at is even larger. and the satellites are all spread across a variety of altitudes, relative to their size.

Satellites already have a nontrivial effort put into keeping their orbits from colliding with each other. Increasing that number by 50% is not going to be easy.

Starlink sats are all in LEO, way below the rest of the satellites currently in orbit

there's other stuff in low orbits, but contrary to the claim, low earth orbits aren't carefully planned. you ask for a rough altitude, and then you get whatever you get, because you probably don't have anything on board for adjusting your orbit.

it's up in geosynchronous where things are carefully planned, and the spacecraft can adjust their orbits, and do lots of long term station-keeping.

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