posted 12-28-2021 12:40 PM               

The two Starlink satellites came close to the space station in July and October, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Tuesday in Beijing. At the time, Chinese astronauts were conducting missions on the station, which had to adopt emergency measures to avoid collisions, he said.

posted 12-28-2021 12:45 PM               

Notification by China under Article V of the Outer Space Treaty concerning preventive collision avoidance between the China Space Station (international designation 2021-035A) and United States' Starlink-1095 (international designation 2020-001BK) and Starlink-2305 (international designation 2021-024N) satellites.

posted 12-28-2021 07:18 PM               

With all 2000 plus (and counting):

posted 12-31-2021 06:51 PM               

Elon Musk has pushed back on claims from the European Space Agency that SpaceX was blocking out rivals in space, saying there was room for "tens of billions" of satellites in orbit.

In an interview with The Financial Times, the CEO likened the number of satellites flying in low Earth orbit (LEO) to having two billion cars and trucks on Earth.

Given that orbital "shells" are bigger than the Earth's surface, "that would imply room for tens of billions of satellites," Musk told the FT.

"A couple of thousand satellites is nothing. It's like, hey, here's a couple of thousand of cars on Earth — it's nothing," he added.

posted 01-04-2022 05:23 PM               

...the two reported Starlink conjunctions represent only a small fraction of the total expected close approaches that Tiangong would have experienced during a one-year period - just 2.4% [100 x (2 maneuvers attributed to Starlink per year) / (83.7 total avoidance maneuvers per year)].

...Starlink only accounts for about 7% of all conjunctions within 5 km, and 17% of all Tiangong encounters with active spacecraft. Debris is identified as the dominant source of close approaches; debris fragments generated by China's own ASAT test in 2007 and the recent Russian ASAT test contribute to this debris risk.

posted 10-13-2023 09:44 PM               

By 2035, if the expected large constellation growth is realized and debris from Starlink satellites survive reentry, the total number of hazardous fragments surviving reentries each year is expected to reach 28,000, and the casualty expectation, the number of individuals on the ground predicted to be injured or killed by debris surviving the reentries of satellites being disposed from these constellations, would be 0.6 per year, which means that one person on the planet would be expected to be injured or killed every two years.