It’s been a mixed few months for SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. The company continues to ramp up deployments of the internet service-providing satellites, which with today’s launch, will push the number in orbit close to 2,000. But the company has also drawn increasing scrutiny, with both China and NASA recently raising concerns about Starlink’s potential to cause collisions with other objects in low-Earth orbit.
Now, SpaceX is seeking to assuage some of these concerns. In a statement posted on its website Feb. 22, SpaceX pledged it is “committed to maintaining a safe orbital environment, protecting human spaceflight, and ensuring the environment is kept sustainable for future missions to Earth orbit and beyond.” The company argued that it has designed Starlink to be a safe and sustainable system and revealed details about how its satellites act autonomously to avoid collisions — details that it had previously only hinted at, or that analysts had suspected.
“This is certainly the most detailed explanation SpaceX have given of their procedures,” Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Astronomy. “It is welcome, although a couple years later than it could have been.”
Collision course
Astronomers and dark sky advocates have long raised concerns about Starlink, which seeks to provide broadband internet access to anywhere in the world. The satellites leave bright trails through astronomical images and are especially visible to the naked eye shortly after they are launched, before they ascend to their operational orbit.
However, SpaceX’s statement comes as concerns about collisions are getting more attention. On Dec. 3 of last year, in a rare move, China submitted a complaint to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, saying that the nation’s crewed space station had to perform a maneuver to avoid a potential collision with a Starlink satellite on two separate occasions, July 1 and Oct. 21 of last year. (McDowell verified the orbital maneuvers with public tracking data.)
In a Dec. 28 press briefing, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman accused the U.S. of ignoring its obligations under the Outer Space Treaty, Bloomberg reported. That treaty holds that nations that have signed it bear the responsibility for supervising their country’s activities in space, whether done by a national space agency or a commercial operator.
Then, on Feb. 7, NASA’s human spaceflight division submitted a letter to the Federal Communications Commission raising concerns about Starlink’s plan for its second-generation constellation, for which SpaceX is seeking approval to launch 30,000 more satellites. In the letter, which was first reported by Space News, NASA said a megaconstellation of that size would raise the risk of collisions in space that could threaten its satellites and astronauts. The agency also said that glints of reflected sunlight could interfere with its space telescopes and Earth-observing satellites.