One of the scariest parts of this project was learning more about Starlink's orbital operations. I had always assumed they had some kind of clever configuration of the satellites in the orbital shell that minimized conjunctions, and we would see the number of conjunctions grow over time. But no! It's just random! There's no magic here, it's just avoiding collisions by moving a Starlink satellite every 2 minutes. This is bad.
I'll end with the last paragraph of the paper:
"In addition to the dangerously high collision risks calculated here, we are already experiencing disruption of astronomy, pollution in the upper atmosphere from increasingly frequent satellite ablation, and increased ground casualty risks. By these safety and pollution metrics, it is clear we have already placed substantial stress on LEO, and changes to our approach are required immediately."
2 interviews lined up to talk about the CRASH Clock so far!
And I usually say yes to just about every interview request I get, but I got 1 interview request on a non-urgent, non-time-sensitive astronomy topic late on a Friday afternoon asking to talk today or tomorrow. I think I will have to blow that one off and focus on other things.
It's been interesting putting up a high-impact (hopefully no pun there) paper and getting lots of feedback! One (highly respected!) scientist graciously showed us a small error in our calculation, which we have fixed. It's like crowd-sourced peer-review. Interesting.
So, with that fix, the CRASH Clock is now at 5 days instead of 3 days. (If you think that extra time means there's no problem, you missed the point here!)
New from Scientific American: https://archive.ph/6BwqQ
I've seen some truly bad headlines related to this paper. Clearly LLM-written and not checked well. The funniest (saddest) ones seem to imply that 3 days from now, there will definitely be a crash in orbit.
I'm glad conversations are happening as a result of this paper. I hope the right conversations happen with the right people, and maybe some regulations will happen? Probably not fast enough. But I'm still holding out hope (and writing lots of letters to the FCC).
Oh hey look, a Starlink satellite "experienced an anomaly" and ejected a bunch of debris. Explosion? Debris hit? Either way, not good..
https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlink-satellite-malfunctions-ejects-debris-fragments
editing to add snark (because that's how I deal with bad news I guess): Don't worry everyone, SpaceX says it'll reenter in a few weeks and totally won't crash into anything! Please ignore the spray of debris that's at basically the exact same altitude as the ISS!
To clarify, I don't think this is at all catastrophic. Just bad. Making orbit less safe with every explosion. Making that CRASH Clock a little shorter, giving operators a little less time to respond, requiring more tracking, more maneuvers, and increasing operating risks in orbit.
I look at https://spaceweather.com/ all the time to check for auroras. Pretty cool to see a paper I'm a co-author on featured there!!
Prof. Sam Lawler