The website of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) recently revealed that China’s space station has implemented emergency collision avoidance twice this year, both to avoid SpaceX’s “Starlink” satellites, sparking heated debate in China.
Many Chinese netizens are unhappy with SpaceX and its founder, Elon Musk, for taking up space resources, and several foreign media have also taken notice of the matter. Reuters reported that Elon Musk was slammed by Chinese netizens who complained that SpaceX was “creating space junk”. The Guardian, the Independent, the Financial Times, the BBC, Al Jazeera and other media outlets also quoted similar content on the matter.
Under the “Starlink” program, SpaceX is expected to launch 42,000 satellites into space, and has already launched 1,900 of them. Since its inception, the program has been feared by space experts to “increase the risk of satellite collisions.”
On Dec. 3, the Permanent Mission of China to the United Nations and other international organizations in Vienna sent a note verbale to the U.N. Secretary-General informing him that the Starlink satellites launched by the U.S.-based SpaceX had approached the Chinese space station twice this year, posing a threat to the lives and health of astronauts aboard the station, according to a recent release on the official website of the U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian also responded on Dec. 28, “I can responsibly confirm to you that the Starlink satellites launched by SpaceX approached the Chinese space station twice in July and October 2021. During this period, Chinese astronauts were on a mission inside the space station, and for safety reasons, the Chinese space station took emergency collision avoidance measures.”
Starlink satellites have reportedly been “repeat offenders” in causing emergency collision avoidance incidents.
On Sept. 2, 2019, less than four months after the launch of SpaceX’s first 60 Starlink satellites, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) scientific satellite Aeolus engaged in evasive braking to avoid a collision with the Starlink-44 satellite. According to estimates at the time, the chances of a collision were about one in a thousand, ten times the starting value of the ESA’s required evasive braking probability.
At the time, the European Space Agency tried to contact SpaceX, but SpaceX did not take any action. Afterwards, SpaceX claimed that the company’s program malfunction caused the failure to receive emails from the European Space Agency.
In recent years, as the pace of human development of the universe continues to advance, the safety problems caused by the large number of space satellites and space junk flying at high altitudes on Earth have become increasingly prominent. 2009 saw a very famous high-speed collision between the U.S. commercial communications satellite Iridium 33 and the Russian military communications satellite Cosmos 2251 collided at a speed of 12 kilometers per second 789 kilometers above the Tymmel Peninsula in Siberia, and a large amount of debris from the collision is still flying at high speed more than 700 kilometers in space today.
And Elon Musk’s and SpaceX’s Starlink program could pose an even more serious safety hazard. The goal of the Starlink program is to build a large constellation of satellites in near-Earth orbit. Currently, SpaceX has launched a total of 1,944 satellites, of which 1,797 are still in orbit. The project’s future plans are even more ambitious, as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has approved 12,000 Starlink satellites for launch, and SpaceX is applying to add a further 30,000 Starlink satellites to that number.
According to statistics from Jonathan C. McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 26 of the 1,797 Starlink satellites still in orbit are completely out of control, but they are still in near-Earth orbit and will have to wait for their slow descent in the thin high-altitude atmosphere to crash back to the surface.
The Starlink program has long sparked much discussion and criticism in the space exploration field.
In August 2021, Hugh Lewis, a space debris expert and lead scientist at the Astronautics Research Group at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, tweeted estimates of the near-contact events caused by the Starlink program. He calculated the number of close contact events using the SOCRATES (Satellite Orbital Conjunction Reporting for Assessing Threatening Space Contact Events) database. Since the beginning of 2019, a large number of close contact events (within 1 km) between satellites were caused by Starlink satellites.
After May 2021, Starlink satellites have caused more than half of the total number of close contact events. In the face of widespread criticism and skepticism, SpaceX designed an automated collision avoidance system for the Starlink program, but the Aeolus satellite in 2019 and the emergency collision avoidance events on the Chinese space station this year show that this system is clearly not perfect.
In addition, another major problem caused by the Starlink program is light pollution. The numerous Starlink satellites have seriously affected astronomical observations, sparking protests from the astronomical community. Elon Musk claimed that he would modify the Starlink satellites to reduce the reflectivity of the satellites to reduce light pollution. However, SpaceX’s investment in this area is very limited, and the new modified satellites will still significantly interfere with astronomical observations.
These problems caused by Starlink mean that how to coordinate the operation of many artificial satellites in the future, to regulate space development, to avoid causing safety problems and to reduce the impact on other areas of human activity, is a problem that must be solved by all government departments as well as space companies in the commercial space era. No one wants scenarios like the science fiction movie “Gravity” to occur in reality. For this reason, any space developer must assume the appropriate international responsibility.