alt Hacker NewsAssuming all these companies are interested in launching their own constellations of ~10K-100K satellites into L/MEO, how many companies could actually do this before cascading collisions starts becoming a real worry?
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Make the US land area ~20% larger.
Randomly place 50,000 shoe boxes up and down the entire eastern seaboard.
Randomly place 50,000 shoe boxes up and down the entire western seaboard.
Send them in straight lines towards the other side of the country.
See if any collide. Almost certainly none of them will. Edit: They will almost certainly
For reference, if you placed all 50k boxes next to each other on the same beach, it would be about 10 miles wide. The total shoreline on either side would be ~1800 miles wide.
And that's only 2D.
If they put their sats low enough (like Starlink already mostly does) any collision debris should be quickly deorbitted by drag, before a cascade can happen.
AFAIK they're in separate shells so the probability of collision is basically zero.
According to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b66ZZ05wKC0 this might end very badly very soon.
> how many companies could actually do this before cascading collisions starts becoming a real worry?
Twenty of them at 100,000 birds each to start approaching the density of planes in the sky [1]. Not around an airport. In all of the sky. Oceans and all.
Practically speaking, this is not a pressing concern for our generation.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46711405