A "House of Cards" is a wonderful English phrase that it seems is now primarily associated with a Netflix political drama. However, its original meaning is of a system that is fundamentally unstable. It's also the term Sarah Thiele, originally a Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia, and now at Princeton, and her co-authors used to describe our current satellite mega-constellation system in a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv.
The Kessler stndrom isn’t sci-fi anymore, it’s a chain reaction which is more and more probable with the amount of fragments in orbita and not only in a narrow band, but covering the whole planet. And no, not affect only companies, it affects the whole satelite system, GPS, climate observation, space stations, communication, etc… hundreds of thousand fragments and old sats out of order and control, with speeds of 20-30 km/s are not a joke, not only for Starlink, also for all other satelites and stations.
https://platform.leolabs.space/visualization
You understand that not all satellites are in Low Earth Orbit right? And even those that are in LEO, not all of them are in the same orbital path. So even if all of Starlink satellites exploded and polluted their orbit with a worse case scenario, GPS wouldn’t be affected (GPS orbit is 20,000km away from Starlinks with hugely different Delta V required to interact with them). LEO Polar Orbits wouldn’t be affected, and any space faring nation would still be able to launch missions that avoid the polluted orbital area.
Kessler syndrome is a concern for “economical” space exploitation, but not actually an issue for a Government that cared and wanted to prevent it.
Do you have any sources on the worst case scenario outcomes? I had a write up I put together but should probably do some more reading before posting a 5 paragraph essay on the matter
I’m aware that not all objects are on the same hight, there are several layers, but currently all layers are saturated with sats, working or not and thousends of tons of debris of every kind. This is getting worst with every launch of new sats. In the page i posted you can see the current objects and their data in real time. Every possible crash, like the some month ago, the small object perforanting the Chinese space station, luckily with not big consequences, and similar which even destroyed some sats, augmented the amount of trash. A lot of abandoned sats out of control, like the one from Rusia make the situation not better. Also not a huge amount of sats not able to changing course to avoid a crash.
You cannot fill the sky with all kinds of objects ad infinitum, hoping that this will not have serious consequences in the long run, and we are already about to reach this limit. I don’t care about spy or large corporate satellites, starlink etc. but if they are destroyed they produce thousands of tons of garbage that further endangers essential satellites (GPS, Communications, Climate…) even more, avoiding any new launch , when the expression “launch window” takes on a literal meaning, making it a Frogger game.
Here an report from the ESA, maybe more convincing as my post
https://www.sdo.esoc.esa.int/environment_report/Space_Environment_Report_latest.pdf
Tell us you know nothing about orbital dynamics without telling us you know nothing about orbital dynamics.
Go play some ksp at least and then come back here.
Kessler syndrome may very well be real, but even with todays pace, its insanely far away. Leo is crowded on a visualization sure, but thats because each satellite is at least a pixel in size, which is obviously necessary but sorta dumb. put that at a proper scale and it’s still much less crowded than even the air is with planes.
And no, not all “layers” are “filled.” Not even close. Space is fucking mind bogglingly huge. Put some filters on the visualizing tool. Less than 600km periapsis shows you everything that would decay within a few years. Focus on the red debris and you can see that in action. Not too much there, mostly active satellites.
Filter at 600-800 and we’re talking many years decay time, decades even. Debris there is much more serious and its exactly where we start to see a lot on visualizers because of old collisions and bad stewardship before we cared about these things. But also, focus on the “edge” (for lack of a better term), of the visualizer to see the depth. Notice how although it is looking dense, its really not, things are spread all over that height range, and remember the scale issue. Not to mention there is just less here overall than the lowest orbits.
Goto 800+ and we’re talking 100+ years of decay time where kessler actually matters, and the density is now dropping rapidly with distance.
This is not true. Only LEO at best is saturated. And Kessler syndrome in LEO would have zero effect on GEO or other orbits.