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Frequently Commented Questions: Yes, space looks crowded in these visualizations. But the size of the satellites is exaggerated here by thousands of times. Spa

Frequently Commented Questions: Yes, space looks crowded in these visualizations. But the size of the satellites is exaggerated here by thousands of times. Space is huge and the collision risk is extremely low. If displayed at their true size the satellites would not be visible, and indeed the vast majority are not visible in the real life night sky. The exception is recently launched satellites that are still in transit to their final orbits, but even those are only visible sometimes and generally only within an hour or two after sunset or before sunrise. No, Kessler Syndrome is not a realistic concern for satellites in these orbits. Satellites here experience atmospheric drag and fall out of orbit in five years or so. Collision debris has a higher surface area to mass ratio due to the square-cube law and deorbits faster than that. And it takes a lot less than five years for debris to fall below the orbits of other satellites where it no longer poses any threat of a chain reaction. And no, a collision between two satellites in circular orbits cannot throw debris into much longer-lasting orbits, due to how orbital mechanics works. And even if Kessler Syndrome did somehow happen despite all that, it wouldn't trap us on Earth even for the five year period; a debris cloud would still be quite sparse and launching rockets through it would be no problem since the time spent in the cloud and thus probability of collision would be negligible.

teruakohatu 4y ago
I took a screenshot of the default view on my web browser. The satellites appear to be around 100km in diameter, but they are in reality 7m wide, so they are 14,000x larger on the map than in reality. The entire constellation would fit within 0.2% of one of the white dots as they appear in the map. Then you need to remember that the space is 3D, unlike road surfaces (ignoring bridges etc.)
- gibolt 4y ago
  Put another way, it is like there are 10,000 fish equally spaced around the ocean. One could swim 100 lifetimes and never see another fish.
  - walrus01 4y ago
    As the surface area of a theoretical 3 dimensional spherical shell at earth diameter plus 550 km is considerably larger than the oceans, more like having 10,000 tiny anchovy sized fish, swimming a hundred lifetimes and never seeing one.
- Veedrac 4y ago
  Space is not really 3d in the intuitive sense from a packing perspective, because satellites take up orbits rather than stationary points and orbits don't pack densely. It's more like an embedded 2d space, the intuition for that being that a ring, think Saturn's, is 2d and intersects any orbit.
  - godelski 4y ago
    Bullshit. Space is definitely 3D and has 3D packing. Starlink is at about 550km. That has an orbital period of 1.5917hrs. Satellites are 7m (as suggested above, but this sounds large). So let's space the next group by 10km. Now the orbital period is 1.5952hrs. We have to go to 580km (+30km) to get to 1.6hrs, which is a difference of 37 seconds. So you got 60km (520km-580km) where you have an error rate of under 1% (0.65%). That drift per day is easily accounted for and you're not going to have a destructive resonance event during the lifetime of the satellites. For comparison, the ISS (~420km orbit) has a natural decay of 2km per year. It's safe to say that you can pack these satellites <1km in orbital height without realistic risk of them running into one another. The real problem is tracking everything and we often have large margins of safety. Sure, you won't pack them like you would oranges, but even several kms apart that can create a pretty dense coverage map. Gravitational orbits aren't electron orbits and don't need to be quantized (at least on the tens of km level).
    - Veedrac 4y ago
      I'm not considering such concerns at all; my comment holds even considering perfect orbits followed by frictionless point objects of zero mass. You can of course pack into the height-dimension trivially when using circular orbits; the issue then is how many orbits you can pack into an orbital plane. I contend it scales with radius, not radius squared.
      - about3fitty 4y ago
        Also, it is kind of like an extreme version of the risks of flying cars. One hubcap/collision can mean catastrophic downstream effects.
- samstave 4y ago
  I found this helpful, to illustrate how massive the orbital 'spheres' are https://i.imgur.com/zGaLWDg.jpg https://i.imgur.com/zGaLWDg.jpg
tenpies 4y ago
It does seem like we need a term for a civilisation that decides that serving internet is more important than its ability to observe the universe. Then, in that pursuit, they completely miss an otherwise easily detectable near earth object and become extinct, but the satellites will continue happily beaming internet to a user base that no longer exists. Then again, it's probably a non-issue. Not because the satellites impede our ability to observe, but because we observe so little to begin with.
- vlovich123 4y ago
  That and our current ability to detect and do anything about a civilization ending asteroid is pretty nonexistent at the moment.
- crispinb 4y ago
  > a civilisation that decides that serving internet is more important than its ability to observe the universe It's slightly worse than that. Starlink is only viable because of huge gaps in planned provision of what is now a basic utility (even government services in many parts of the world are hard to access without the internet). We're actually giving up our inalienable and multimillenial rights to a real night sky in order to leave gaps in utility provision for greedy wanker billionaires to make money and gain power filling.
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    Starlink sats don't stick around for multiple millennia. Their orbit degrades quite fast. You need much higher orbits for such longevity.
    - crispinb 4y ago
      No wasn't suspecting nuisance-satellite of being near-eternal! I mean we have had a real night sky for millenia, and now a handful of men are being permitted, with hardly any communal discussion or decision, to expunge it. Many won't notice, of course, having been denatured by suburbia.
ck2 4y ago
There's several more startups filing to launch their own 10,000+ satellites. The sky is going to be trashed like the scooters littered across every major city's sidewalks, seemed like an acceptable idea on paper by the eager governments beforehand but in reality it just makes an absolute mess that no-one seems to take responsibility for or ever fixes.
- RedCondor 4y ago
  100%.
- Jon_Lowtek 4y ago
  > no-one seems to take responsibility No profit oriented corporation will ever take responsibility for downsides of their business that can be pushed onto others as externalities. The answer is to force them with regulations. (This is the general rule, exceptions do exist like brands or product lines that cater to the niche of people especially conscious of a particular issue. The food sector is a good example. Note how those who do tend to create self-regulation with certifiable standards and that, strictly speaking, they can not externalise that specific issue so they don't)
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  It’s worth noting that the only reason that megaconstellations even work as a business model is thanks to telecom giants refusing to develop infrastructure everywhere it’s needed, despite making promises and taking government handouts to do so for decades, as well as being monopolists and obstructing competition where competitors were trying to make good on development promises. This left a vacuum which is now being filled since LEO is a place where incumbent telecoms have little power to obstruct (though this hasn’t stopped them from trying). So in my mind, if we want to curb megaconstellations, the best way to do that is to strip telecoms of their monopolist powers and mandate development of fiber infrastructure in the ground, which even the best LEO constellations don’t have so much as a hint of hope of competing with. The economics will cease to make sense and the constellations will be canceled and decommissioned. We can’t just leave that open vacuum.
reaperducer 4y ago
Space is huge and the collision risk is extremely low. See also: "We'll never run out of IPv4 addresses."
- dmbche 4y ago
  "The bubble is never gonna pop!"
- gpm 4y ago
  No. We all know that we can fill it up. But every launch the FCC requires you do calculations to show that the chance of collision is below some threshold. I.e. that it (the orbit you are in) isn't full yet.
rlt 4y ago
Yes, space is huge, however offsetting that a bit is satellites in LEO orbit at something like 20,000 MPH, so reaction time for collision avoidance is lower than you might expect, and impact velocity will result in a very large debris field.
la64710 4y ago
But the question is who gave this one guy right to surround our earth like this? As the power of individuals grow is there going to be any oversight to ensure a consensus is reached collectively before someone decide to do something like this? I agree that technically it may not be as bad as it looks but just in principle one cannot fathom the level of reach that modern civilization allows to just one person that this map demonstrates.
- oh_sigh 4y ago
  Do you think China or Russia would ever agree to a global satellite internet connectivity initiative that allows anyone to easily bypass their information control mechanisms?
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    Even without notoriously disagreeable players like China and Russia at the table, reaching consensus becomes almost impossible past a certain number of parties involved. If global consensus were required for anything almost nothing would ever get done, and what little did happen would be design-by-committee’d into ineffectiveness. That’s not to say that individuals should necessarily be able to do whatever they please on things of this scale, but trying to make everybody happy is a great recipe for endless stagnation.
- dgoodell 4y ago
  Do you really think Spacex required no permission at all for this? It certainly required approval from the FCC & FAA to launch this so I think you could say that US government gave him the right to do this. Then you could ask: "Why does the US government have the right to do this?" I think the answer to that is probably the Outer Space Treaty which is signed on by most countries including all major spacefaring nations. This may have been stopped (and still can be) if there was major uproar among the US populace or by other countries. I don't recall hearing much about that. In any case, I'm not sure there is a sufficient reason to stop it. The biggest issue that I have heard about is the potential for a negative impact on ground-based astronomy. That's obviously not good, but I'm not sure it's a sufficient reason to stop this.
mgoetzke 4y ago
Over all of Germany there where 6 when I looked just now. So yeah, not really crowded :)
chlorion 4y ago
Thanks for posting this! I see a lot of people getting riled up about "space junk" and how we have filled the space with tons of junk. Humans are really bad at understanding things that are really big, and the amount of space is incredibly larger than they realize, to the scale where these satellites are literally like a gallon of water in the ocean.

teruakohatu 4y ago

I took a screenshot of the default view on my web browser. The satellites appear to be around 100km in diameter, but they are in reality 7m wide, so they are 14,000x larger on the map than in reality. The entire constellation would fit within 0.2% of one of the white dots as they appear in the map. Then you need to remember that the space is 3D, unlike road surfaces (ignoring bridges etc.)

gibolt 4y ago
Put another way, it is like there are 10,000 fish equally spaced around the ocean. One could swim 100 lifetimes and never see another fish.
- walrus01 4y ago
  As the surface area of a theoretical 3 dimensional spherical shell at earth diameter plus 550 km is considerably larger than the oceans, more like having 10,000 tiny anchovy sized fish, swimming a hundred lifetimes and never seeing one.
Veedrac 4y ago
Space is not really 3d in the intuitive sense from a packing perspective, because satellites take up orbits rather than stationary points and orbits don't pack densely. It's more like an embedded 2d space, the intuition for that being that a ring, think Saturn's, is 2d and intersects any orbit.
- godelski 4y ago
  Bullshit. Space is definitely 3D and has 3D packing. Starlink is at about 550km. That has an orbital period of 1.5917hrs. Satellites are 7m (as suggested above, but this sounds large). So let's space the next group by 10km. Now the orbital period is 1.5952hrs. We have to go to 580km (+30km) to get to 1.6hrs, which is a difference of 37 seconds. So you got 60km (520km-580km) where you have an error rate of under 1% (0.65%). That drift per day is easily accounted for and you're not going to have a destructive resonance event during the lifetime of the satellites. For comparison, the ISS (~420km orbit) has a natural decay of 2km per year. It's safe to say that you can pack these satellites <1km in orbital height without realistic risk of them running into one another. The real problem is tracking everything and we often have large margins of safety. Sure, you won't pack them like you would oranges, but even several kms apart that can create a pretty dense coverage map. Gravitational orbits aren't electron orbits and don't need to be quantized (at least on the tens of km level).
  - Veedrac 4y ago
    I'm not considering such concerns at all; my comment holds even considering perfect orbits followed by frictionless point objects of zero mass. You can of course pack into the height-dimension trivially when using circular orbits; the issue then is how many orbits you can pack into an orbital plane. I contend it scales with radius, not radius squared.
    - about3fitty 4y ago
      Also, it is kind of like an extreme version of the risks of flying cars. One hubcap/collision can mean catastrophic downstream effects.
samstave 4y ago
I found this helpful, to illustrate how massive the orbital 'spheres' are https://i.imgur.com/zGaLWDg.jpg https://i.imgur.com/zGaLWDg.jpg

tenpies 4y ago

It does seem like we need a term for a civilisation that decides that serving internet is more important than its ability to observe the universe. Then, in that pursuit, they completely miss an otherwise easily detectable near earth object and become extinct, but the satellites will continue happily beaming internet to a user base that no longer exists. Then again, it's probably a non-issue. Not because the satellites impede our ability to observe, but because we observe so little to begin with.

vlovich123 4y ago
That and our current ability to detect and do anything about a civilization ending asteroid is pretty nonexistent at the moment.
crispinb 4y ago
> a civilisation that decides that serving internet is more important than its ability to observe the universe It's slightly worse than that. Starlink is only viable because of huge gaps in planned provision of what is now a basic utility (even government services in many parts of the world are hard to access without the internet). We're actually giving up our inalienable and multimillenial rights to a real night sky in order to leave gaps in utility provision for greedy wanker billionaires to make money and gain power filling.
- wkat4242 4y ago
  Starlink sats don't stick around for multiple millennia. Their orbit degrades quite fast. You need much higher orbits for such longevity.
  - crispinb 4y ago
    No wasn't suspecting nuisance-satellite of being near-eternal! I mean we have had a real night sky for millenia, and now a handful of men are being permitted, with hardly any communal discussion or decision, to expunge it. Many won't notice, of course, having been denatured by suburbia.

ck2 4y ago

There's several more startups filing to launch their own 10,000+ satellites. The sky is going to be trashed like the scooters littered across every major city's sidewalks, seemed like an acceptable idea on paper by the eager governments beforehand but in reality it just makes an absolute mess that no-one seems to take responsibility for or ever fixes.

RedCondor 4y ago
100%.
Jon_Lowtek 4y ago
> no-one seems to take responsibility No profit oriented corporation will ever take responsibility for downsides of their business that can be pushed onto others as externalities. The answer is to force them with regulations. (This is the general rule, exceptions do exist like brands or product lines that cater to the niche of people especially conscious of a particular issue. The food sector is a good example. Note how those who do tend to create self-regulation with certifiable standards and that, strictly speaking, they can not externalise that specific issue so they don't)
kitsunesoba 4y ago
It’s worth noting that the only reason that megaconstellations even work as a business model is thanks to telecom giants refusing to develop infrastructure everywhere it’s needed, despite making promises and taking government handouts to do so for decades, as well as being monopolists and obstructing competition where competitors were trying to make good on development promises. This left a vacuum which is now being filled since LEO is a place where incumbent telecoms have little power to obstruct (though this hasn’t stopped them from trying). So in my mind, if we want to curb megaconstellations, the best way to do that is to strip telecoms of their monopolist powers and mandate development of fiber infrastructure in the ground, which even the best LEO constellations don’t have so much as a hint of hope of competing with. The economics will cease to make sense and the constellations will be canceled and decommissioned. We can’t just leave that open vacuum.

reaperducer 4y ago

Space is huge and the collision risk is extremely low. See also: "We'll never run out of IPv4 addresses."

dmbche 4y ago
"The bubble is never gonna pop!"
gpm 4y ago
No. We all know that we can fill it up. But every launch the FCC requires you do calculations to show that the chance of collision is below some threshold. I.e. that it (the orbit you are in) isn't full yet.

rlt 4y ago

Yes, space is huge, however offsetting that a bit is satellites in LEO orbit at something like 20,000 MPH, so reaction time for collision avoidance is lower than you might expect, and impact velocity will result in a very large debris field.

la64710 4y ago

But the question is who gave this one guy right to surround our earth like this? As the power of individuals grow is there going to be any oversight to ensure a consensus is reached collectively before someone decide to do something like this? I agree that technically it may not be as bad as it looks but just in principle one cannot fathom the level of reach that modern civilization allows to just one person that this map demonstrates.

oh_sigh 4y ago
Do you think China or Russia would ever agree to a global satellite internet connectivity initiative that allows anyone to easily bypass their information control mechanisms?
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  Even without notoriously disagreeable players like China and Russia at the table, reaching consensus becomes almost impossible past a certain number of parties involved. If global consensus were required for anything almost nothing would ever get done, and what little did happen would be design-by-committee’d into ineffectiveness. That’s not to say that individuals should necessarily be able to do whatever they please on things of this scale, but trying to make everybody happy is a great recipe for endless stagnation.
dgoodell 4y ago
Do you really think Spacex required no permission at all for this? It certainly required approval from the FCC & FAA to launch this so I think you could say that US government gave him the right to do this. Then you could ask: "Why does the US government have the right to do this?" I think the answer to that is probably the Outer Space Treaty which is signed on by most countries including all major spacefaring nations. This may have been stopped (and still can be) if there was major uproar among the US populace or by other countries. I don't recall hearing much about that. In any case, I'm not sure there is a sufficient reason to stop it. The biggest issue that I have heard about is the potential for a negative impact on ground-based astronomy. That's obviously not good, but I'm not sure it's a sufficient reason to stop this.

mgoetzke 4y ago

Over all of Germany there where 6 when I looked just now. So yeah, not really crowded :)

chlorion 4y ago

Thanks for posting this! I see a lot of people getting riled up about "space junk" and how we have filled the space with tons of junk. Humans are really bad at understanding things that are really big, and the amount of space is incredibly larger than they realize, to the scale where these satellites are literally like a gallon of water in the ocean.