this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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There are ~20,000 objects in orbit large enough to be tracked as hazards. Personally unclear if that includes active satellites, but that's 'only' another ~10,000.
There are ~100,000 airline flights a day worldwide.
How crowded does the sky look with planes?
Yes space junk is a thing to be concerned about / regulate. But at the scales involved it's basically negligible. We're orders of magnitude away from any kind of cascade or locking ourselves out of orbit or any other doomsday scenario.
Planes can also move out of the way of other planes, and have air traffic controllers directing them. Space junk doesn't do that, and while I agree that space junk isn't "crowding" space at this point in time. It does appear to be ever growing and it is just a matter of time before an important satellite is taken down due to neglecting this ever growing space junk problem.
Satellites do. They also are required to have plans to be raised to a graveyard orbit or to be de-orbited. This one failed to reach it's graveyard orbit is the issue. It can be an issue if it gets out of hand, but it really isn't for a long time. Space is big. By the time it is an issue, we'll probably trivially be able to handle the cleanup (or we're in another dark age).
Space junk is highly deterministic, though. No atmosphere to fuck with.
Are all satellites coordinated in a mesh? If so, that's pretty cool. I thought it was chaotic and they were basically saying like "chances of collision are 0.0001%, send that mofo and good luck".
Satellites have some degree of mobility and space junk follows trajectories that can be computed basically infinitely into the future.
There's little chaos. Something in orbit can be projected out for a long time with little error based on just a few observations, so even things not sending data back we can track fairly trivially. If something is in orbit it stays in mostly the same orbit unless it hits something else.
(There are very small changes based on gravity depending on how dense the area below it is, but that effect is fairly small and probably accounted for in simulations to some degree. Low orbits will also have some atmospheric effects too. They will all also have small changes based on solar radiation as well, but this is really minor.)