A Chinese Rocket Breaks Apart Dangerously Close To the Starlink Constellation (arstechnica.com) 92
A Chinese Zhuque-2E rocket's upper stage broke apart shortly after last week's June 9 launch, likely creating 100 to 150 pieces of debris in a busy region of low-Earth orbit crossed by the ISS and lower-altitude Starlink satellites. Most fragments should reenter within months because of atmospheric drag, but experts say the incident adds to a worsening trend as China leaves more large rocket bodies in orbit while expanding its launch rate. Ars Technica reports: The US Space Force confirmed the breakup event in a post on space-track.org, a website used by the military to distribute orbit data to the public. "The tracked pieces are being incorporated into routine conjunction assessment to support spaceflight safety," the Space Force wrote in an advisory. "There are currently no threats to human spaceflight. Analysis is ongoing." So far, the Space Force has not added any of the debris fragments to the official catalog of human-made space objects.
[...] The bad news is that the Zhuque-2E's breakup is the latest chapter in China's growing contribution to the space junk problem. After decades of leaving spent rocket bodies in orbit, launch operators in most countries now reserve enough fuel to steer their upper stages back to Earth for controlled reentries. Rocket bodies attributed to Russia and the former Soviet Union account for the bulk of the launch-related debris in long-lived orbits, followed by China and the United States. But the Russian and American numbers are declining or holding steady, while the mass of Chinese rocket bodies in these long-lived orbits has grown by more than 150 percent in the past five years, according to a new analysis by Space Domain Awareness expert Jim Shell. The increase comes as China ramps up launches of its own megaconstellations designed to compete with SpaceX's Starlink.
Rocket bodies are the most concerning sources of space debris because they are typically fairly large in size and mass, often with residual propellant and high-pressure gases that can trigger an explosion. There is no way to maneuver or dispose of them if left abandoned in orbit after releasing their payloads. McKnight characterized the recent breakup of the Zhuque-2E rocket as a "slight space safety issue," but the trend is not good. China's Long March 6A rocket has an especially bad track record, including two explosions that littered a higher-altitude low-Earth orbit with more than 1,000 debris fragments, where they will remain for decades or centuries. "Three of the top four breakup events in LEO are of Chinese origin, with two of these events being from Chinese (rocket body) explosions in the last four years," McKnight said.
[...] The bad news is that the Zhuque-2E's breakup is the latest chapter in China's growing contribution to the space junk problem. After decades of leaving spent rocket bodies in orbit, launch operators in most countries now reserve enough fuel to steer their upper stages back to Earth for controlled reentries. Rocket bodies attributed to Russia and the former Soviet Union account for the bulk of the launch-related debris in long-lived orbits, followed by China and the United States. But the Russian and American numbers are declining or holding steady, while the mass of Chinese rocket bodies in these long-lived orbits has grown by more than 150 percent in the past five years, according to a new analysis by Space Domain Awareness expert Jim Shell. The increase comes as China ramps up launches of its own megaconstellations designed to compete with SpaceX's Starlink.
Rocket bodies are the most concerning sources of space debris because they are typically fairly large in size and mass, often with residual propellant and high-pressure gases that can trigger an explosion. There is no way to maneuver or dispose of them if left abandoned in orbit after releasing their payloads. McKnight characterized the recent breakup of the Zhuque-2E rocket as a "slight space safety issue," but the trend is not good. China's Long March 6A rocket has an especially bad track record, including two explosions that littered a higher-altitude low-Earth orbit with more than 1,000 debris fragments, where they will remain for decades or centuries. "Three of the top four breakup events in LEO are of Chinese origin, with two of these events being from Chinese (rocket body) explosions in the last four years," McKnight said.
no room (Score:4, Funny)
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No they don't
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But yes, you are right, I should do the math.
Re:no room (Score:4, Insightful)
And then remember that they can maneuver to avoid collisions. Imagine there were only 10k cars driving on earth and they could all see each other coming. How many collisions do you expect in a year? I don't expect very many.
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Re:no room (Score:4, Informative)
There's 10,000 starlink sats, each of which is about 30 m^2. That's 300,000 m^2. Meanwhile, the total area available in that orbit is 510,000,000,000,000 m^2, they take up 0.000,000,05% of the space up there. And that's assuming that they sit flat on the orbital plane, which they don't.
Re:no room [unless you boost the odds?] (Score:2)
But what if you put the initial degree in a retrograde orbit? If the objective is to maximize the likelihood of maximum damage, then the extra launch cost would make sense. There's a fundamental advantage on the side of trying to increase the entropy.
"It was just an unfortunate accident that the bucket of ball bearings got dumped into orbit going the wrong way!" (With apologies to Joe Dimaggio, but not THAT Joe Dimaggio.)
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A deliberate attack to knock out as many satellites as possible is a very different thing from Kessler syndrome. The blame for such an act would in no way be on the owner of the satellites that got taken out.
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Not clear about your point, but I acknowledge that I was thinking about the Chinese as possible adversaries who might try to disguise an attack as an accident. I was also thinking in terms of Murphy's Law in the sense that if you have a network of communications satellites that could be destroyed in a certain way, then it isn't necessary sufficient to hope it never happens, irrespective of whether that happening is a true accident or an attack.
In the end, chaos always wins? And geologic trim is always incom
redundancy (Score:3)
Re:redundancy (Score:5, Informative)
Have you never heard of Kesler syndrome [wikipedia.org]?
Re:redundancy (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, that's not really a thing in LEO where debris clears itself fairly quickly due to atmospheric drag.
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At the Earthlink altitude it takes 10-20 years on average for an object to de-orbit.
Earthlink has no satellite constellation of their own, I suspect you were trying to be clever but didn't realise that Earthlink is an ISP that partners with a satellite company that doesn't operate in LEO.
Starlink on the other hand have objects that de-orbit in 5 years, not 10-20.
Because the number of objects increase dramatically every time there is an explosion/collision, we have likely already hit Kesler syndrome.
We have objectively not, and are very far from it.
That is, even if we don't launch anything else, the amount of space junk will just keep increasing.
Completely incorrect based on your own first sentence which itself was incorrect in stating too long of a time frame. Starlink launches are already effectively largely on a replacem
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Earthlink has no satellite constellation of their own, I suspect you were trying to be clever
Nah I just typed the wrong word and meant Starlink.
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At the Earthlink altitude it takes 10-20 years on average for an object to de-orbit.
Nah I just typed the wrong word and meant Starlink.
Curious as to what number you are using for the Starlink altitude.
Their shells are in quite a wide range. Over the last year the bulk of the established satellites have been shifting lower and many of the new satellites (especially onces with direct to cell capability) are being deployed even lower than that. Those lower orbits measure decay time in weeks to months.
Re: redundancy (Score:3)
That's what a lot of the "Starlink causes Kessler!" scaremongers don't realize -- as of last year, Starlink's orbital shell sits where there basically isn't any debris at all, and what is there is very short lived. Atmospheric drag quickly clears low mass debris at that altitude. Higher mass objects have to actively maintain their orbit (including e.g. attitude control, thrust) or their lifetime is best measured in months rather than years.
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Re:redundancy (Score:4, Interesting)
Even this article says that most parts will reenter in a few months. Anything small and low-density will come down rapidly due to drag at that altitude and the rest will follow.
SpaceX chose it in part so a dead satellite wouldn't stay around for long causing trouble for other Starlink satellites or other users of that region of space.
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SpaceX chose to use LEO in order to address latency. The drag is just a bonus. But if they used a higher orbit, then the satellites would be further apart from one another. The risk of Kessler syndrome would be higher if a collision occurred, but there would also be less collision risk.
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Yeah, that's not really a thing in LEO where debris clears itself fairly quickly due to atmospheric drag.
Define quickly.
Because the YOLO stock market that snorts lines of pure HFT for breakfast every morning might have already auto-shorted every company affected 37 milliseconds after the first impact was reported.
I hope we have a fairly good grasp on the fact that LEO moves at the speed of Greed now. Impacts don’t have to hit ground to be felt. Hard.
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Yeah, that's not really a thing in LEO where debris clears itself fairly quickly due to atmospheric drag.
A Kessler event is not precluded from LEO. Give a rogue state a rocket, doesn't even have to be a large one, just capable of launching say 100 pounds of sand or little ball bearings, and place it in a retrograde orbit. and release the payload.
That it doesn't take as long to clear the debris, isn't all that relevant, the LEO areas will be unusable for a while.
Re:redundancy (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, that's not really a thing in LEO where debris clears itself fairly quickly due to atmospheric drag.
A Kessler event is not precluded from LEO. Give a rogue state a rocket, doesn't even have to be a large one, just capable of launching say 100 pounds of sand or little ball bearings, and place it in a retrograde orbit. and release the payload.
Deliberate antisatellite destruction is something we reasonably ought to worry about, but it is not the same thing as Kessler syndrome.
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Deliberate antisatellite destruction is something we reasonably ought to worry about, but it is not the same thing as Kessler syndrome.
That is very true. It certainly could start one if everything aligns.
While looking for NORADs site, I came across a couple gems: https://pocketworld.org/space-... [pocketworld.org] https://orbitalradar.com/track... [orbitalradar.com]
Not like all those things are in one area, it looks worse than it is. But the "nothing to see here" folks remind me of people looking for RF spectrum. They so often think of bandwidth as something infinite. I sometimes have to point them to the Big NTIA map on the wall and say "Find a place!" It's a cool map
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Yeah, that's not really a thing in LEO where debris clears itself fairly quickly due to atmospheric drag.
That depends on relative velocity on any potential impact, including directional forces applied. You slap something hard enough outward and it won't be in LEO anymore. Granted, it's slim chances at the moment that this happens, but with how fucked up we've managed to make every other aspect of our world, do you completely discount the possibility of us managing to thread that needle?
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Orbits don't work that way. If something is in orbit, and you hit it hard, one end of the orbit will go high, and the other end will go low. And it will go through the point of impact once in every orbit. (I think "point of impact" means "some point on the original orbit", but it may be more specific.)
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But DOGE banned atmospheric drag, based on an "anti-woke" keyword search.
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Yeah, that's not really a thing in LEO where debris clears itself fairly quickly due to atmospheric drag.
Sorry, but this isn't true :(
There are lots of orbit regimes in LEO, and lots of debris so you absolutely can get a cascade of collisions. But maybe the nuance is in "fairly quickly". Lots can go wrong in those weeks
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I probably should have added some details. Check out the results of the 2009 Iridium COSMOS collision. There's still thousands of debris we have to avoid daily from that https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
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Yeah, that's not really a thing in LEO where debris clears itself fairly quickly due to atmospheric drag.
I know you already know everything, so when you see a link to wikipedia you don't need to review the information at all before deciding "yer rong!!!," but it may actually be that the entirety of the Kesler Syndrome hypothesis or scenario is based in LEO.
You may want to look into it. (And in general, re-cap with a wikipedia-level source before shouting "yer rong!!!" even though you already know everything. You're welcome.)
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Not a risk here though, because at this altitude most of it will decay and burn up in months or less.
Decaying at the speed of HFT. (Score:2)
Not a risk here though, because at this altitude most of it will decay and burn up in months or less.
I wonder just how many companies who rely on LEO and getting through it to other orbits will decay right into bankruptcy while listening to Kessler be debated for months in the hallowed halls of every crippled org on the planet, after someone working the liability mitigation department once said..
”not a risk here.”
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In this case the rocket failed on the way up, and there isn't much anyone can do about that.
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In this case the rocket failed on the way up, and there isn't much anyone can do about that.
Understand that this Kessler event that you claim is not a risk, is not something that is necessarily invoked on purpose. That rocket disassembling itself could do it.too
People need to understand that there is a lot of LEO sats up there, and not just StarLink. Other nations are starting their own Satellite based internet systems. Other uses are being found for that neighborhood.
And maybe the critical threshold isn't quite there yet. Yet.
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I wasn't suggesting that a failed rocket couldn't cause a Kessler event, I was saying that nobody has rockets that can safely de-orbit themselves in the event of a catastrophic failure. Hopefully it happens at low enough altitude for that to happen naturally, but if propulsion is lost or it disintegrates higher up, it can't really be helped.
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If it's still going up, it probably has a very eccentric orbit, and so will decay more quickly. But, yeah, it would be nice if there were some way to solve the problem. All I can think of is shooting the small pieces with lasers to vaporize them.
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In this case the rocket failed on the way up, and there isn't much anyone can do about that.
Aren't we discussing the June 9th Landspace launch?
That launch did not fail on the way up. Its second stage successfully deployed two different direct to cell test satellites for two different providers. The failure came later - believed to be when it was about to start up for its reentry disposal burn.
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Not a risk here though, because at this altitude most of it will decay and burn up in months or less.
So none of the products of collisions go to a higher shell?
And those who dismiss a Kessler event at LEO seem to neglect all of the losses in whatever the dead sats were doing, and the expenses of replacing them after that claimed extremely rapid de-orbiting non-event.
It is true, a Kessler event either accidental or purposely created, would be a long term disaster at Geosynchronous orbit.
But one in LEO would be a short term disaster, no matter how much the this isn't a problem people minimize it.
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cling to your fear, that is the way to the dark side
Who's afraid, middle cow and?
My only hope is that it is at night, some of these things might be interesting if it happens right after it gets dark. Tequila and popcorn FTW.
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Falling and burning satellite release particles of aluminum oxide cause chemical reactions that destroy stratospheric ozone. And the nanoparticles continue to do so while they drift down, which takes about 30 years. A typical satellite contains 30% aluminum.
I hear they replaced aluminum with aluminium. Problem solved.
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I watched Wall-e and understood the gravity of space junk.
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The bad news is that the high cost of maintaining that satellite fleet and the need to have big fat juicy government contracts in order to make it profitable means that SpaceX is not a viable company. Go watch the tail end of the l
Re:redundancy (Score:5, Informative)
The bad news is that the high cost of maintaining that satellite fleet and the need to have big fat juicy government contracts in order to make it profitable means that SpaceX is not a viable company.
Again with the maintenace costs. So again, can you please explain why you think maintaining the fleet is going to be worse than intially launching the fleet?
So much wrong with the big fat juicy government contracts statement. First of all, the phrasing is just plain intellectually dishonest. You know damn well that SpaceX is charging the government less than other commercial providers. You wanna talk big fat juicy contracts? Go compare what ULA is charging for say a GPS satellite. ($214 million vs $143 million ish) You should thank your lucky stars SpaceX is being so evil.
Second, the government contracts certainly help the bottom line, but are not required for profitability. In terms of pure launch services, the government is providing about half their revenue - roughly 2 billion for third party launches and 2 billion for governent (split pretty even between NASA crew/cargo and military/intel). Again, those contracts are saving the government money over what ULA or Russia charges. On the Starlink side, the 8.7 billion from the consumer and commercial side dwarfs the 2.7 billion from StarShield.
Math gets fuzzy as while it easy to simply wipe all current government revenue from the SpaceX books, you have to get into serious guessimating to figure out how much of their expenses would go down if they lost all government contracts. And gets even more theoretical since SpaceX is absolutely financially bogged down with that massive xAI tumor Musk bolted onto their side. But very roughly if you strip off xAI numbers SpaceX with government is 3.8 billion operating income vs around 1.5 billion without.
The SpaceX IPO is structured so that if you bought it as a retail investor you can't sell for 120 days.
Nope. There are brokerage penalties for retail investors trying to flip IPO stocks immediately but that varies by brokerages and applies to all IPOs - not a SpaceX specific policy. Insiders who had preIPO shares do have restriction. Traditionally preIPO insiders have been locked in for 180 days to avoid an immediate cashout SpaceX structured their lock in period to avoid a 180 day mass sell off by allowing a percentage to be sold at 70, 90, 105, 120 and 135 days. That is the only 120 day number I can find.
Musk, by the way, is not allowed to sell anything for a full year.
and after that every single index fund in the country is forced to buy into it whether they want to or not.
Nope, depends on the fund. S&P 500, nope. They have a year long seasoning rule and a requirement on profitability. Nasdaq-100, yes. They recently shrunk their requirements in order to attract SpaceX and OpenAI listings over other exchanges such as NYSE. Now only 15 days until they include SpaceX stock instead of, I think, December.
It's possible that corruption will keep government contracts going his way and therefore keep the stock price up
Corruption? *snort* Yeah, that horror of charging $71 million less to put a GPS into orbit than ULA. Space Force phase 3 is $5.9 billion to SpaceX for 28 missions. ULA $5.4 billion for only 19 missions. $74 million per mission cheaper going with SpaceX. Similarly massive savings for NASA having SpaceX do manned launches vs paying the Russians. I can stand more of this corruption.
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It's not a serious comment. If you look at the highest-rated comments in /. on this subject, they're more about dogmatic virtue-signaling than meaningful comments about technology, science, or even this fairly important issue to near space viability.
My observing this will immediately get this post downrated despite it being a factual observation because on slashdot now:
Post 1: Elon is a stupid poopyhead, +5 Insightful
Post 2: SpaceX has vastly decreased launch costs per kg (fact), Tesla more or less single-
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Nobody cares about your theory that tiny-moustache-man was actually a sensitive poet, or that he invented veganism. We know your interest is just about being a not-see.
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True, but it's something to think about when discussing SpaceX's plan for adding thousands of AI data centers in space.
I doubt that they were going to get launch costs down to the point where that became profitable anyway, but the idea of an errant Chinese or Russian rocket accidentally or "accidentally" destroying a few of them is probably something that SpaceX investors are thinking about right now. They're too busy buying up those shares at insanely inflated prices.
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Starlink is technically profitable but it's heavily subsidizing the actual rocket business which is a huge money loser. It's expensive to put shit in space especially when you have to replace it every 5 years. And starlink is always competing primarily with wired internet.
So they're going to be very sensitive to having their satellites knocked out of orbit.
It is kind of funny that Musk books 7 billion in profit on starlink and 5 billion in losses from
Idiots (Score:2)
Short-sighted greed is usually attributed to capitalists. In this case, the rush to dominate will destroy access for everyone.
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It's NOT the opposite. Both sides are doing it.
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And of course it's not really a problem if China clobbers the ISS, right?
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You know Starlink and the ISS are in different orbits right? If I throw a brick out my window would you worry about it hitting you given you don't have a clue where on earth I am right now?
Take a Xanax or smoke a joint. You're clearly too stressed.
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You know Starlink and the ISS are in different orbits right?
You know that as orbits decay the satellites move to lower orbits, right?
Starlink operational orbits are (slightly) higher than the ISS orbit. If they stop being operational, they will move through successively decreasing orbital altitudes, including orbits that intersect the ISS orbit. (But note that "intersecting the ISS orbit" does not necessarily mean "intersecting the ISS".)
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(But note that "intersecting the ISS orbit" does not necessarily mean "intersecting the ISS".)
But note that it does not necessarily mean that it won't, either.
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(But note that "intersecting the ISS orbit" does not necessarily mean "intersecting the ISS".)
But note that it does not necessarily mean that it won't, either.
Exactly. And even if the probability of an intersection is small... there's a lot of StarLink satellites
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The summary states that the rocket debris threatens the orbit of the ISS.
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no just all the spots from earth to mars
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The law under international treaties says the US government is responsible for all satellites launched from US territory or by US companies. That is why SpaceX have to get permission from the US government to launch.
Other than that, space is like the oceans where you can travel at will wherever you want. Currently you can't claim territory in space, but that will change soon as it becomes possible for people to live there rather than just take a vacation.
People's attitude to this is interesting ... (Score:2, Insightful)
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It's unproven, possibly would make the problem worse if things broke up in unexpected ways, and energy-intensive.
On the other hand (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's...that's not a thing.
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Starlink satellites are everywhere, complicating launches and astronomy observations
Calculating launch envelopes has to be getting pretty computationally complex.
It's like the game frogger, except you can't go backwards.
Re:Starlink satellites are everywhere (Score:2)
the cockroaches of the heavens
SpaceX refueling in space (Score:1)
Been wondering how much of an explosion and debris risk is posed by the SpaceX plan to refuel in space
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Are they planning on using a hypergolic fuel? If not, I wouldn't expect there to be much explosion risk.
Not to worry (Score:3)
If history shows us one thing, it's that humanity is remarkably capable at recognizing and avoiding unsustainable practices.
Musk's toy got bonked? (Score:1)
Where's that micro-violin I loaned to a tardigrade?...
Starlink? I'm glad. (Score:2)
Elon has personally shit on the "commons" of LEO orbit, it's hypocritical if you are bothered by someone else trashing his already-placed trash satellites.
China maybe intentionally bumping Starlink (Score:4, Informative)
Elon (Score:1)