Stargaze: SpaceX's Space Situational Awareness System

Honestly, these two paragraphs are one of the most compelling things they could possibly say in a press release:

> Stargaze already has a proven track record in its utility for space safety. In late 2025, a Starlink satellite encountered a conjunction with a third-party satellite that was performing maneuvers, but whose operator was not sharing ephemeris. Until five hours before the conjunction, the close approach was anticipated to be ~9,000 meters—considered a safe miss-distance with zero probability of collision. With just five hours to go, the third-party satellite performed a maneuver which changed its trajectory and collapsed the anticipated miss distance to just ~60 meters. Stargaze quickly detected this maneuver and published an updated trajectory to the screening platform, generating new CDMs which were immediately distributed to relevant satellites. Ultimately, the Starlink satellite was able to react within an hour of the maneuver being detected, planning an avoidance maneuver to reduce collision risk back down to zero.

> With so little time to react, this would not have been possible by relying on legacy radar systems or high-latency conjunction screening processes. If observations of the third-party satellite were less frequent, conjunction screening took longer, or the reaction required human approval, such an event might not have been successfully mitigated.

Looks like a non-trivial upgrade to previous systems, and they're making Stargaze's data available to other satellite operators free of charge. Nice!

Seems like a generally good idea, the satellites already need to use star trackers, they need an almanac of what should be there so deviations need to be tracked.

I can entirely see the military perspective though, this is almost a direct challenge for any adversary that any maneuver you perform, we will know about it.

Damn it. I wanted to use that name

"To maximize safety for all satellites in space, SpaceX will be making Stargaze conjunction data available to all operators, free of charge, via its space-traffic management platform."

Many people don't still realize it, but the problem of low orbit debris is only getting worse. So, this is a really nice gesture. Thank you, Elon Musk.

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Who knew that Big Brother would name himself after a 1990s movie about a completely different premise?

This seems necessary and desirable, but pretty much a government function. I can't see how simple good-faith cooperation prevents abuse.

Possible abuses:

(1) Use the information to actually interfere or collide with satellites

(2) Use the information to track secret satellites by excluding traces from non-secret ones

(3) Free riders gaining secondary access without providing data

(4) Use access to this when traffic is more contended to enforce hegemony

(5) Anti-competitive coordination under the rubric of cooperation

And while the system might be helpful under ordinary peacetime conditions, will it make a war more or less destructive?

It's silly that NASA is planning for Mars and the moon but hasn't already solved this coordination problem on a world scale.