Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

It is particularly bad for a satellite in geostationary orbit to break up or fail. Satellites are packed as tightly as possible into that orbit due to its economic importance (it's very useful for a satellite, particularly communications satellites, to always be over the same part of the Earth), so there is a higher than normal likelihood that this could be seriously disruptive.

Not to mention debris can be in GEO for a long, long time. People worry about LEO constellations causing Kessler syndrome, but the reality is that LEO debris deorbits in the order of months/years. GEO is much, much longer.

> Not to mention debris can be in GEO for a long, long time.

On human timescales, it's basically forever. Hopefully we'll develop the tech to clean up debris in space, but it's extra challenging to do it in geostationary orbit since it's so far away from Earth, both in terms of actual distance, and delta-V.

> People worry about LEO constellations causing Kessler syndrome, but the reality is that LEO debris deorbits in the order of months/years.

It's a little more complicated than that. The time to spontaneously deorbit is based on orbital height. Starlink can deorbit on its own in 5-10 years because it's orbiting so low. But any OneWeb satellites that malfunction[1] will take 1000+ years to deorbit because they're up at 1000+ km.

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1. Like this one

https://spacenews.com/oneweb-mulls-debris-removal-service-fo...