alt Hacker NewsBut apart from all the other stuff you mention, you’re missing an important point: these things move. And unless all objects are synchronized (which they are not) they occupy a whole orbit, not only their actual volume. If two orbits intersect, the objects occupying those will eventually collide.
Therefore, they occupy much more volume.
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The dimensionality of usable orbits is much less than 3.
For example all the GEO satellites are positioned along a 1D line.
What you say is important of course, and it's what makes me less than sure in my assessment. It was after all more of a mental exercise in appreciating just how vast an area of space this relatively tiny quantity of objects is spread across.
To give one further perspective example here: a single large bulk container ship can carry up to 8,500 car-sized units.
This means that even if every single one of the maybe 15,000 satellites in orbit were the size of a car (most of them are much smaller actually), all together, they'd fill no more than the storage spaces of two bulk container ships with lots of room to spare at that.
This, spread over a multi-layered area as vast as our orbital space, means that even with their constantly moving at incredible speeds, and all the junk out there scattered between the satellites themselves, there's an enormous amount of emptiness between it all mitigating against impacts being very likely or frequent at all.
After all, of the 8,070 or so Starlink satellites in orbit right now, there's little mention of more than a few having been knocked out by debris in orbit. It seems that solar storms are their much bigger worry and cause of mishaps.
As the saying goes, space is huge, sometimes more than our brains can easily comprehend. This applies even in the comparatively tiny orbital regions of it that we use daily.
Yes. This is the idea behind Kessler Syndrome - that the accumulation of clutter in Earth orbit could lead to an "ablation cascade" as more and more things collide and more and more debris is created from those collisions leading to Earth orbit becoming too hazardous to traverse.
"A 1 kg object impacting at 10 km/s, for example, is probably capable of catastrophically breaking up a 1,000 kg spacecraft if it strikes a high-density element in the spacecraft. In such a breakup, numerous fragments larger than 1 kg would be created." https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/library/a-technical-asses...