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Space is more like international waters legally. The outer space treaty is rooted in maritime law principles. The Chinese and Russians are in no mood to slow do
by jillesvangurp 19d ago
Space is more like international waters legally. The outer space treaty is rooted in maritime law principles. The Chinese and Russians are in no mood to slow down relative to the US. There will likely be some escalation in debris and damage resulting from that might eventually result in some kind of action. But most of the damage here would be economical and sending more stuff up is now very cheap. Manned flight is relatively infrequent and aside from the space station and very short lived space tourism, most activity in space is unmanned.
So, if a lot of satellites get taken out that's a problem but if a few get lost, nobody will care. The space station and other important stuff can be in relatively safe orbits. There's also the notion that a lot of the debris in low earth object comes down pretty quickly. Lots of unstable orbits. LEO is where most of the activity is for things like starlink and competing constellations. Which moderates the risk a bit.
- hajile 19d agoSpaceX satellites are doing about 1000 collision avoidance maneuvers every single day. The addition of new networks is going to congest things even more and the risk of unavoidable cascading failure keeps increasing at a massive rate.
- jillesvangurp 19d agoThose are pre-emptive moves for minimizing what is a very small chance of collisions, not narrowly escaped near certain collisions. Air traffic control does a similar thing with keeping planes spaced apart in zones under their control. In space a small thruster nudge will have a huge impact at a very low cost
- hydrogen7800 19d agoI learned that within the 2 hour launch window for Artemis 2 there were many blackout periods ranging from seconds to minutes for collision avoidance.
- throwitaway222 19d agoAt some point they need to remove all the objects that can't do 1000 collision avoidance maneuvers per day.
- nomel 19d agoNo, they do not actually, because they fall out of orbit in ~5 years, since they're in the lower part of the thermosphere.
- JumpCrisscross 19d ago> SpaceX satellites are doing about 1000 collision avoidance maneuvers every single day Genuine question: how many avoidance maneouvres does maritime traffic execute in the open ocean?
- beambot 19d agoThe blast radius from a maritime collission is (mostly) relegated to the vehicles in question [1]. The same is not true for satellite collisions. [1] There are counterexamples, like in narrow chokes & whatnot.
- JumpCrisscross 19d ago> same is not true for satellite collisions Space is big. Volume grows with radius in a way our intutiions don't seem to intuitively understand. Yes, debris in a space collision go further. But they're still bound by their energies. And that larger volume of collision debris (plus all other stuff in orbit minus the Moon) is still a smaller fraction of the orbital space than e.g. commercial air space on earth, and yes, that's including oceans.
- eks391 19d agoSpace is huge, but being on land has some advantages too. It's true that volume grows, but satellites don't have brakes in the way that cars do, nor is there a cleanup crew that removes the debris after a crash. You can remove curbs and any other barrier to simulate the fact that cars can maneuver away from a crash site, but if no site is ever cleaned, and no car has meaningful brakes, crash sites are much scarier.
- throwitaway222 19d agoI wonder how many collision avoidance maneuvers are performed every day by human drivers. It must be in the trillions.
- hajile 18d ago
- 4gotunameagain 18d ago> The Chinese and Russians are in no mood to slow down relative to the US. Typical boogeyman fearmongering to justify the existence and expansion of the US military industrial complex. Out of all these three (US, China, Russia), a simple count of who has started more wars and conflicts is a clear indicator of who is the one initiating the vicious cycle of aggression and "defense" budgets.