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.

- "Satellites are packed as tightly as possible into that orbit due to its economic importance"

Note that that's in the sense of angular separation, as viewed from the ground. They're physically hundreds of kilometers apart.

edit: (Geostationary orbits are ~42,000 km from the Earth center-of-mass; each degree of angle is an arc of ~700 km).

> They're physically hundreds of kilometers apart.

That’s pretty close when your neighbor just exploded and there’s almost exactly zero air resistance to prevent debris from reaching you.

Yes there's no air resistance, but also most of the fragments aren't going your way.

If you have a 25 m^2 cross section in the direction of the explosion, at that distance you have a roughly 1 in 246 billion chance of any given bit of debris hitting you.

What is the chance of getting hit by further broken pieces of that satellite and other satellites?

When calculating risk, you have to take into account how many are there and what is the chance that any will be hit. Then you have to calculate what's the chance this will happen again, etc - and only then you can calculate the risk to your own satellite.

It's true that the chance of getting hit by one broken satellite is small. But that assumes there are exactly 2 things on the orbit.

Aka Kessler syndrome [0] or neutron flux / cross-section (and associated equations, if you want to model it that way) [1].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_flux