Starlink’s India debut comes amid growing fears of space congestion and satellite collisions

Amid Elon Musk's Starlink getting its net favorable reception to launch in India and even reports about prices surfacing, it is high time to take a look at how sustainable the space congestion problem is as a rising number of satellites crowd the Earth's orbit.

Scientists are now claiming that our current situation regarding satellites in space is akin to a 'house of cards,' where one solar storm can lead to what is called the Kessler Syndrome, a theoretical event in which satellites collide, leading to a destructive situation in the Earth's orbit.

A filing by the US' Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2023 shows that SpaceX's Starlink satellites were making around 50,000 collision avoidance maneuvers in the last four years, and the number can rise to a million in every six months by 2028, as per University of Southampton astrophysics professor Hugh Lewis.

With the number of collision avoidance maneuvers continuously increasing, the margin for error keeps getting less and less. If Kessler Syndrome, which till now is only theory, does happen, it could mean a complete stoppage of sending spacecraft to orbit, since their chances of colliding with space debris will also shoot up.

Solar storms could be the tipping point that makes Kessler Syndrome a reality, as per a team of researchers at the Princeton University.

Solar storms heat up the atmosphere, resultantly increasing atmospheric drag. This leads to more fuel requirement for satellites to continue to remain in orbit as well as perform collision avoidance maneuvers.

The researchers have pointed to the "Gannon Storm" that occurred in May 2024, leading to more than half of the Earth's satellites which were in low orbit to use up parts of their fuel for repositioning purposes.

Solar storms can also damage the communications and navigation systems of satellites, thus increasing chances of orbital collisions.

The researchers have come up with a metric called the CRASH (Collision Realization and Significant Harm) Clock to highlight the problem of increasing congestion in space.

This metric describes the amount of time in which a catastrophic collision might occur if a solar storm leads to all satellite operators losing the ability to communicate as well as avoid collisions by performing evasive maneuvers.

As per calculations, the CRASH Clock is currently at 2.8 days, and in comparison, was 121 in 2018. Notably, this huge difference is because SpaceX started lifting its mega-constellation of Starlink satellites to space in 2019.

The paper has been pre-printed on arxiv.org.

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