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SpaceX 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

by hajile 18d ago

SpaceX 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 18d ago
Those 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 18d ago
I 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 17d ago
At some point they need to remove all the objects that can't do 1000 collision avoidance maneuvers per day.
- nomel 17d ago
  No, they do not actually, because they fall out of orbit in ~5 years, since they're in the lower part of the thermosphere.
JumpCrisscross 17d 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 17d ago
  The 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 17d 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 17d ago
      Space 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 17d ago
  I wonder how many collision avoidance maneuvers are performed every day by human drivers. It must be in the trillions.
  - hajile 17d ago
    Loads of those result in crashes with some involving hundreds of cars. Just one collision in space carries an ever-increasing risk of cascading into a major event with long-term effects (there's no a good way to call in a space wrecker to haul billions of tiny bits out of orbit).
- 17d ago

by hajile 18d ago

jillesvangurp 18d ago

Those 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 18d ago

I 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 17d ago

At some point they need to remove all the objects that can't do 1000 collision avoidance maneuvers per day.

nomel 17d ago
No, they do not actually, because they fall out of orbit in ~5 years, since they're in the lower part of the thermosphere.

JumpCrisscross 17d 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 17d ago
The 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 17d 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 17d ago
    Space 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 17d ago
I wonder how many collision avoidance maneuvers are performed every day by human drivers. It must be in the trillions.
- hajile 17d ago
  Loads of those result in crashes with some involving hundreds of cars. Just one collision in space carries an ever-increasing risk of cascading into a major event with long-term effects (there's no a good way to call in a space wrecker to haul billions of tiny bits out of orbit).
17d ago