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Comment by moralestapia | Hacker News Reader

>This type of program has high value per dollar spent.

Care to elaborate?

What's the value that comes back?

If you save a billion dollar satellite every decade, and it costs $50 million year, you come out ahead. And that's not even counting the negative externalities of unintended conjunctions. Kessler Syndrome is the boggieman of course, but even a few thousand pieces of debris from a single conjunction makes life harder for everyone who operates in space.

> If you save a billion dollar satellite every decade, and it costs $50 million year, you come out ahead.

Why should the (US) taxpayer foot the bill rather than the companies who operate and profit from the satellites?

Would you argue that every road should be a toll road, too?

the government already needs to track satellites to prevent its own from getting hit, and to track foreign spy satellites. IMO it would be reasonably for Congress to pass a law to allow the FAA to charge private companies who launch satellites in the US, but killing the program is just very dumb

Has this ever happened?

Satellites make conjunction avoidance manoeuvres on a regular basis; about 275 Starlink satellites need to move every day. A non-trivial proportion of those would result in a collision otherwise. Satellites orbit at multiple km per second and manoeuvre to adjust orbit much more slowly, so they need advance warning.

Satellite operators obtain much their space situational awareness data directly or indirectly from US govt sources. The fact that collisions are presently infrequent because satellite operators act on that data isn't a particularly good reason to eliminate much of it

Yes it has.

Source? Google doesn't give me anything.

There was a collision between two comm satellites about 16 years back [1], and that was with satellites that we could track and theoretically control - with the debris collision of 2005 [2], that makes two events.

We've been lucky that this is the only publicly known satellite to collide with another satellite, other than satellites that got shot down as a demonstration of power.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision

[2] https://www.space.com/969-china-space-debris-collide-orbit.h...

There is a Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_collision

measles was extinct in the US until the antibaxers gained enough momentum

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