Scientist Says Starlink Satellites Responsible for More than Half of Close Encounters In Orbit Written 19 August 2021
View of 60 Starlink satellites from the 24 May 2019 launch. | Credit: Official SpaceX Photos, CC0/Wikimedia Commons
SPACE reports that University of Southampton Astronautics Research Group head Hugh Lewis said SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are involved in about 1,600 near collisions between two spacecraft every week. Lewis said, “I have looked at the data going back to May 2019 when Starlink was first launched to understand the burden of these megaconstellations. Since then, the number of encounters picked up by the Socrates database has more than doubled and now we are in a situation where Starlink accounts for half of all encounters.”
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