5 ms·

I think these constallations need to move to some sort of multi-nation joint system. It's seems likely we'll have 5+ of these constallations up in the near fut

• brianwawok 5y ago
  Nothing says success project like bureaucracies of 200 nations involved.
• eloff 5y ago
  The volume of space is still really large though. If managed well, it will be fine. For some intuition around this, the volume is greater than the part of the atmosphere where airplanes fly, but the traffic is much less and more predictable. It's good to have some competition, additional capacity, and redundancy by having separate networks.
  • gspr 5y ago
    Yeah, the traffic is more predictable, but when something goes wrong, traffic in airspace can easily maneuver to avoid problems. And moreover, in airspace a disaster is local – the debris from a satellite collision is unpredictable and can stay around for years and years!
    • rtkwe 5y ago
      Yeah this could go bad though there are some mitigations in place. These are relatively low, iirc the full satellites are supposed to burn up in a few years once they go offline without any intervention.
      • zamadatix 5y ago
        For Starlink, other constellations are being launched in orbits twice as high. Once one collision occurs at those altitudes it takes many lifetimes for the uncontrolled debris to leave ortbit.
      • gspr 5y ago
        I'd still want some international agency actually enforcing this. Musk's word is worth absolutely nothing.
        • mlindner 5y ago
          There's a national agency actually enforcing this... Further his point was that if SpaceX disappeared tomorrow, the satellites would all deorbit in under a decade given their low altitude, which is quite fast compared to disposal rules currently mandated by the US government. Physics determines this, not governments or billionaires.
          • gspr 5y ago
            Unless they happen to collide with something due to their deteriorating, less predictable orbits, of course.
            • rtkwe 5y ago
              Even when their orbit starts decaying they're not generally a direct threat to other satellites as long as they can maneuver. The US maintains a pretty good tracking network that will pick up any whole satellite at least once every few orbits. On that timescale there's not a significant change to the orbit of an object so they remain pretty predictable out far enough for a maneuverable satellite to make a small change to avoid a collision.
            • mlindner 5y ago
              Even if they hit something, those debris would also decay in roughly the same time frame.
    • londons_explore 5y ago
      Satellites are very maneuverable too when you consider they normally only need to shift a few yards to avoid a collision, as long as their orbits can be measured precisely enough.
  • londons_explore 5y ago
    It's really large until people start launching satellites which consist of two masses and a 50km string between them... Just a few of those, and space is full.
• mchusma 5y ago
  Space is massively big. We can easily have a thousand systems like this without getting the density of an airport airspace. We should be trying to put a trillion people in space.
  • gspr 5y ago
    These orbits aren't that far out, so the volume available to them is actually comparable to that of airspace. However, there are some massive differences. First, in airspace you can easily maneuver and change directions if problems arise. Second, while a collision in airspace is certainly a local disaster, it's limited in scope. A collision between satellites creates a giant scattering of debris with unpredictable orbits. Debris that can stay in orbit for years and years.
    • mynameisvlad 5y ago
      Airspace is usually up to flight level 600, or 60k feet. That's around 18km. Starlink flies at an altitude of around 550km, so more than a magnitude higher. How could the volume between them be in any way comparable?
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • gspr 5y ago
        Uh, because if you wanna talk about the radii of the spherical shells like that, you need to consider the actual radii, namely the distance from the shell to the center of the Earth. In your example (which is an exaggeration, FL600 isn't really used for commercial flights), airspace goes from 0 to 18 km above the surface of the Earth. The Earth's radius itself is approximately 6400 km. So airspace is the shell between 6400 km and 6418 km. Starlink operates around 6950 km. That's not "an order of magnitude more", it's completely comparable to airspace, so the space available to the satellites scales with the shell's thickness in almost the same way as airspace does.
      • Ajedi32 5y ago
• pkaye 5y ago
  Each constellation could be in a slightly different elevation.