SpaceX’s Starlink Satellites Cause 1,600 Near-Crashes in Orbit Every Week

They aren’t “near crashes” and a majority of the incidents are with other starlink satellites which means the obvious: this must be by design and approved by engineers and regulators to be within acceptable safety margins.

There is a definition of something that when things come within a kilometer it meets a standard definition, but that standard is perhaps outdated and being inflated for FUD reasons by people with an axe to grind or who want to sell attention.

It would be great to get a regulator to comment on this instead of edgy authors or the Chinese trying to score points.

Seems to be more of a growing pains topic for expansion of activity in low earth orbit more than a reason to get upset and exaggerate.

From the Live Science original source:

> SpaceX's Starlink satellites alone are involved in about 1,600 close encounters between two spacecraft every week, according to Hugh Lewis, the head of the Astronautics Research Group at the University of Southampton, U.K. These encounters include situations when two spacecraft pass within a distance of 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) from each other.

> The current 1,600 close passes include those between two Starlink satellites. Excluding these encounters, Starlink satellites approach other operators’ spacecraft 500 times every week.

> Hesar said that uncertainties in the positions of satellites and pieces of debris are still considerable. In case of operational satellites, the error could be up to 330 feet (100 meters) large. When it comes to a piece of debris, the uncertainty about its exact position might be in the order of a mile or more.

The 1600 number in the title seems to be the number of times a Starlink satellite comes within 1 km of another spacecraft every week while the uncertainties for such craft "could be up to 100 meters". It seems a bit alarmist to transform that into "near-crashes" for the headlines.

> When it comes to a piece of debris, the uncertainty about its exact position might be in the order of a mile or more.

This sounds much more interesting yet no statistics are given on the number of <1 km approaches to debris which makes me think it wasn't as attention grabbing as the other number given. Also lacking is any data on how many orbit changes are done and how that impacts the information given, e.g. is Starlink doing many orbital changes just to a less than 1 km standard proposed in this review? If so why is the 1 km standard treated as such a high risk with the error ranges given, what are the actual risk percentages in these close encounters and should they have really been acted on (or acted on more)?

Overall there is a lot of call for alarm and little sharing of why the data backs it up. It's an interesting topic and concern but seemingly impossible to get solid information on instead of articles just saying we should be concerned.

The satellites are responsible for half of the near-misses in orbit, according to research by Hugh Lewis, head of the University of Southampton’s Astronautics Research Group.

considering starlink satellites make up about half of low earth orbit satellites, i guess this isn’t saying much…

Do they not consider at least the financial loss that would be caused by a collision of their satellite/s? How probable is it that there will come a time when a domino effect of collisions will take out every single satellite?

Also >Taking away the near-crashes between two Starlink satellites, the number of near- misses drops down to just 500 each week — still considerably higher than any other satellite constellation.

I'm not sure if that's relevant or not.

The title of this article is pure misinformation. These are not "near crashes".