Starlink’s got company — and orbital overcrowding is a disaster waiting to happen 

On the evening of April 28th, Amazon embarked connected its latest task to rival SpaceX Starlink: the archetypal launch of its Project Kuiper satellites. With 27 satellites present successful orbit astir the Earth, Amazon joins a increasing fig of companies moving to enactment much than 1,000 satellites each into abstraction to make their ain mega constellation. With each of these objects successful orbit, the dangers of overcrowding are increasing, and if immoderate of these objects were to collide, the results could beryllium disastrous.

Aside from Amazon and SpaceX, UK-based OneWeb, which merged with French outer relation Eutelsat successful 2023, has its ain constellation, and determination are respective planned by Chinese companies, too. There is the Chinese government-backed Guowang mega constellation, which began its launches past twelvemonth but remains veiled successful secrecy, arsenic good arsenic the commercialized Qianfan oregon Thousand Sails project, which began launches successful 2023 and plans to spot a full of up to 15,000 satellites successful orbit.

A recent report from the European Space Agency (ESA) recovered that implicit 2,500 objects were launched into low-Earth orbit successful 2024, much than 5 times the fig of objects launched successful immoderate twelvemonth anterior to 2020. The large chunk o …

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