SpaceX: Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites are real threats in space?

This is the information to be concerned about. As space increasingly resembles a holiday highway in mid-August, the Starlink constellation, developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, looks especially unpleasant. Consisting of more than 1,700 satellites, the project has the laudable goal of providing high-speed internet to all parts of the planet. The fact remains that by increasing the number of machines above our heads, the risk of collision increases. According to the site, it appears that Elon Musk’s machines are real engines Space.com, which cites many scientific sources, they would thus be involved in nearly half of the alerts.

Each week, the billionaire’s machines will participate in approximately 1,600 “close encounters” with other satellites, that is, transits of less than one kilometer. “Data going back to 2019, the first launch of Starlink, examined details of the American site Hugh Lewis, Director of the Astronautical Research Group at the University of Southampton, UK. Since then, the number of meetings has been recorded by Socrates [une base de données qui permet d’anticiper les risques de collision, ndlr] More than doubled, and Starlink is involved in more than half.”

debris danger

If no real collision occurs at the moment, Starlink has already had to perform evasive maneuvers when the stakes only increase. In fact, the SpaceX project, in the long run, provides for the deployment of 12,000 first-generation satellites in space, almost twice the total number of satellites currently in orbit around the Earth, detailing club. Thus, Elon Musk could be involved in approximately 90% of the collision risk in the future.

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A problem that goes beyond even the business of an eccentric billionaire. The development of satellites in space orbit is one of the major security challenges in the future. While OneWeb has just sent 32 more devices into the sky, Amazon could deploy more than 3,000 and the US military network could in the future rely on several thousand satellites, the risk of collision wouldn’t be more significant. A real headache when we know that these accidents create a huge amount of debris that is in itself sources of collision and cannot be deviated from its path.