NASA’s depiction of the 9.000 satellites and 25,000 pieces of space junk orbiting the earth in low earth orbit (top) from 100 to 1200 miles high, and in geostationary orbit (bottom) 22,000 miles up. These are the items large enough to track — an additional half million or so little bitty bits are up there too. All of them are traveling at 15 times the velocity of your average bullet.
I can’t wait for space tourism to be a thing. Can you?
“Beam me up Scotty…WAIT! on second thought….”
Fourteen years ago, the first collision between two satellites occurred:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision
There’ll be more…
These two hunks of junk came within 12 metres of each other:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2257525-two-old-spacecraft-just-avoided-catastrophically-colliding-in-orbit/
Don’t worry about the space tourism 22k miles off the earth’s surface
There you go, it’s the same crowd that can afford to visit the Titanic in a fiberglass submersible
I don’t know how likely the Kessler syndrome is to be a real thing, but it just seems like we are itching to find out. These numbers are also skyrocketing :) as Starlink continues deployment.