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117 points cratermoon | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.215s | source
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mapt ◴[] No.42198516[source]
The current trajectory is that SpaceX proved the commercial and military viability of an LEO megaconstellation, repeatedly lowering their target altitudes and raising their satellite count because of debris and cell size concerns...

And now the rest of the world is trying to catch up in a sort of arms race, and not taking any care about debris concerns. The most tempting orbits are the ones in upper LEO that permit them to launch fewer satellites.

SpaceX are going to end up well under 500km (orbital lifespan: a decade) before things are finished, and they switched to very low orbit staging with SEP spiral out to reach final orbit a ways back.

China's newest constellation Thousand Sails is at an altitude of 800km (orbital lifespan: thousands of years), with a thousand satellites in the works over the next year or so and 14,000 planned, and they're launching them using chemical upper stages designed to explode into a thousand pieces at the target altitude. This is sufficient for Kessler Syndrome all on its own, without counting interactions with anything else up there. A catastropic debris cascade at 800km percolates down to lower altitudes over time and impacts.

We need viable treaties limiting development beyond 400 or 500km and we need them ten years ago.

I don't know how to sell the urgency of this predicament. You can have as many satellites as you want, a million uncoordinated bodies, at 400km because direct collision potential scales with (satellite count / orbital lifespan) ^2 . At 1000km, satellites decay so slowly we are already too crowded; we have already overused the space. We are speed-running the end of the space age and we are doing it to save a small number of dollars and to avoid a small amount of diplomacy.

This is not something we get a do-over on. There is no practical way to collect ton-scale debris at present, no way to track kilogram-scale debris, no practical way to shield pressure vessels against gram-scale debris, and even milligram-scale debris can hit with the force of a bullet. After collisions start occurring at a rapid clip, the mass of potential impactors quickly forms a long tailed lognormal distribution that denies us space for centuries.

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ryankshaw ◴[] No.42199151[source]
Is Kessler syndrome the Great Filter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter)?

As in, is it the thing that makes it so no one else has broken out of their planet to come visit us?

I could totally see it being the case that as soon as a civilization gets good enough at putting stuff into space, they start putting a lot of stuff into space and then things start crashing into each other to the point that they can’t ever launch any more things into space and become stuck. Trapped by the artifacts of their own progress

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lxgr ◴[] No.42201135[source]
I'd consider it much less likely than e.g. nuclear or maybe chemical/biological warfare.

Kessler syndrome (if even achievable with current technology) would be a major bummer for science and the global economy for a couple of decades (no more Starlink, but we still have good old geostationary satellites, so no ships and airplanes would get disconnected as a result), or at worst centuries, but would otherwise not form any threat to civilization, whereas nuclear winter is already very capable of wiping it out.

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m4rtink ◴[] No.42202933[source]
I think it would be actually the other way around - Starlink orbits aee low enough to be self cleaning & Starlink satellites can be (and are) rapidly replenished. So even if something from up above hits anfew, the debris would deorbit soon & new ones could be launched.

With GEO sats, unless you go for direct GEO insertion, it might still have issues reaching the final orbit. And even at GEO, there could be a debris cloud as well causing issues, at least until the sun and moon gravity perturbs it enough.

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perihelions ◴[] No.42203050[source]
- "And even at GEO, there could be a debris cloud as well causing issues, at least until the sun and moon gravity perturbs it enough."

Not a satellite expert, but I understand GEO clears out relatively fast (~decades), because of those 3-body perturbations,

https://www.agi.com/blog/2020/07/geo-satellites-don-t-decay-...

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1. mapt ◴[] No.42205783[source]
Your link talks about how this is an unexpected result, and only occurs at specific inclinations.

It's new information to me, though. Thank you.