[HN Gopher] FCC Approves 5 Year Satellite Deorbiting Rule
___________________________________________________________________
FCC Approves 5 Year Satellite Deorbiting Rule
Author : sebg
Score : 137 points
Date : 2022-09-30 15:41 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (payloadspace.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (payloadspace.com)
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| When exactly did the FCC's jurisdiction extend to the heavens?
| There should be a lot more concern than there currently is over
| an agency granting itself powers over private property in space.
| rzimmerman wrote:
| FCC approval is required to communicate with a (US-based)
| satellite in space, so effectively they can apply rules like
| this one. It's less of a power grab/nefarious plot and more a
| utilitarian kind of thing - the FCC has historically been the
| only agency that has authority to exert this pressure, so the
| work falls on them. It's admittedly odd that it's not the FAA
| or Space Force, but that's how it is.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| If one were to launch satellites over the United States that
| communicate with transponders set up in Mexico, the
| Caribbean, Greenland, and Canada, would that be outside scope
| of the FCC's jurisdiction?
| bluGill wrote:
| In general those countries have their own rules that while
| different amount to the same with different details. The
| smaller countries generally copy what the US does (or
| possibly what the EU does).
|
| While you might be able to find a country to let you pick
| your own rules, you will only be able to talk to your
| satellite which means you can't do much with it. Most
| satellite are used for communicating to people on the
| ground and if you can't communicate to the US the satellite
| is much less valuable.
| frostburg wrote:
| They're friends with other people with guns and rockets.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Well, various government agencies have jurisdiction over, say,
| private cars that drive on public roads, so why couldn't you
| apply similar logic to the FCC with regards to satellite
| regulation?
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| No country has any recognized territorial claims to space.
| Roads are built within and between territories. I don't know
| of a road built on unclaimed territory that grants a far away
| government jurisdiction over every car traveling through the
| said territory, even if these cars used other paths or went
| off-trail.
| l33t233372 wrote:
| The FCC's jurisdiction only applies to satellites
| communicating with US based ground stations.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| The FCC derives its powers from the Communications Act of
| 1934 (before Sputnik) and a few Supreme Court cases, none
| of which have to do with satellite communication. That
| the FCC has jurisdiction over terrestrial radio spectra
| does not give it the right to create additional
| requirements for communication with orbital satellites
| even if there are US-based ground stations involved.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The FCC derives its powers from the Communications Act
| of 1934 (before Sputnik)
|
| ...which has many post-Sputnik amebdments, but
| specifically the FCC role regarding policy for
| communication satellites comes from the Communication
| Satellites Act of 1962.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _The rule shortens the time required for satellite operators to
| deorbit LEO satellites to no more than 5 years after completing
| their mission, from 25 years._
|
| De-orbiting faster means reserving more propellant for the final
| de-orbit burn. Since the lifespan of satellites is already
| generally determined by how much propellant they have, this new
| rule effectively reduces the lifespan of any satellite high
| enough to require a de-orbit burn.
|
| Companies that use very low satellites are impacted less, since
| atmospheric drag does more of the work.
| teawrecks wrote:
| I'm no rocket scientist, but could there be a service which
| knocks satellites out of orbit for people? I wonder how cost
| effective such a service could get. Could one mission knock 10
| satellites out of orbit?
| benslavin wrote:
| I'm aware of Astroscale (https://astroscale.com/). They're a
| Japanese company with a presence in the US and UK that's
| commercializing this sort of service. I'm not sure if they
| have plans for multi-satellite de-orbit services, but they do
| have single-satellite plans.
|
| Among other things, they're promoting a standardized docking
| adapter (https://astroscale.com/docking-plate/) to give
| satellite operators a path to either life extension
| (refueling and/or orbit raising) or de-orbit.
| tejtm wrote:
| Woz seems to think so.
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/01/tech/space-junk-steve-
| wozniak...
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Given Woz's post-Apple track record, that's not a good
| sign..
| loeg wrote:
| It would cost more than reserving some propellant.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Going from travelling at Mach 25 in one direction to
| travelling at Mach 25 in a different direction takes an
| amount of energy comparable to going from 0 to Mach 25. Being
| outside of atmosphere helps a lot, and being able to use the
| less powerful but more efficient electric ion propulsion
| engines helps a lot, but 10 satellites per mission is usually
| not feasible. 3 per mission is the number I've heard.
|
| Some companies approaching this problem are hoping to utilize
| refueling depots. It adds another expensive rendezvous but it
| does help.
| apendleton wrote:
| With a vehicle, probably not. Moving form one satellite's
| orbit to another is extremely fuel-intensive (you'd typically
| need ~thousands of km/h of velocity change to do it), so it's
| not really practical to have a single vehicle up there moving
| from satellite to satellite.
|
| But maybe there'd be some other way to do it? There have been
| proposals for de-orbiting little pieces of debris from the
| ground with lasers, and I suppose it's possible that those
| approaches would scale to bigger objects (or maybe you could
| do it with lasers from other satellites whose orbits were
| fixed, or something).
| dmckeon wrote:
| A set of satellites that could do laser ablation of debris
| or EOL sats would be great, but would need safeguards to
| not become a weapon of economics or war.
|
| Avoiding splash-over or collateral damage to other sats in
| or near the line-of-sight would be an issue, especially if
| any of those other sats might have capabilities that their
| nation/owner might want to keep secret. Perhaps an
| arrangement of vetos over particular ablation shots would
| suffice. Countries wanting to hide their interests in some
| sats could veto N times as many shots as needed, making
| uncovering which sats are special more difficult.
|
| In any case, laser ablation would need much less delta-V
| than the usual imagery of plucky space-cowboys chasing
| errant sats with a net, or some such. Who knew that
| _Planetes_ would have such a strong effect on our
| collective imagination.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| In the far future, perhaps orbit-cleaners could eat dead
| satellites and space debris, atomizing the debris and
| turning it into reaction mass.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| How does this FFC rule work in an international market? I
| assume it applies for US companies with US based launches.
|
| Does it apply to US satellite companies with ex-US launches?
|
| Are US companies free to purchase service/bandwidth from ex-US
| launched satellites which are not compliant?
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| US companies launching satellites with foreign launch
| providers still need to get a license from the FCC if their
| satellite uses radio communications.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| How about foreign satellites on foreign launch systems that
| wish to communicate with ground stations in the US? I
| assume they also need an FCC license.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Yes, satellites communicating with ground stations in the
| US need licenses from the FCC, regardless of where
| they're launched or where the owner is based. US
| satellites that exclusively communicate with ground
| stations outside of the US might not, but I'm not sure
| about that. Satellites launched by other US government
| agencies (NRO, etc) might also be exempt.
| wumpus wrote:
| > De-orbiting faster means reserving more propellant for the
| final de-orbit burn.
|
| One new technology is releasing a sail to increase drag.
|
| Example: http://www.parabolicarc.com/2021/08/23/millennium-
| space-syst...
| pessimizer wrote:
| If rules didn't cause inconvenience to someone, they wouldn't
| have to be written.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| I was thinking more along the line of the new rule giving
| another commercial advantage to SpaceX. Starlink will be
| effected, their satellites already deorbit faster than 5
| years. But many other satellite operators will have to launch
| more frequently, and SpaceX is positioned to meet that
| growing demand.
| chousuke wrote:
| I don't really see it as "giving" a commercial advantage to
| anyone if the new rule's purpose is to prevent something
| harmful and someone happens to benefit because they're
| already not doing that harmful thing.
|
| In my view it's really a separate issue if SpaceX has too
| many advantages and that levelling the playing field
| somehow would be useful; allowing companies to grow too
| powerful does cause problems, and I don't think there's a
| moral requirement for regulators to be "fair" when dealing
| with corporations. They are not humans.
|
| The need for that sort of intervention should not keep us
| from instating otherwise beneficial rules, though.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _In my view it 's really a separate issue if SpaceX has
| too many advantages_
|
| That's not what I was saying. I was offering an
| observation, not a critique. I think this new rule is
| good.
| chousuke wrote:
| Oh, I didn't really read it as a critique; mostly just
| the phrasing of "giving another commercial advantage"
| made me want to comment since it can be read as if that's
| the (or even just a) purpose of the rule.
| xani_ wrote:
| > But many other satellite operators will have to launch
| more frequently, and SpaceX is positioned to meet that
| growing demand.
|
| Read the article. It's about deorbiting after mission is
| finished.
|
| If you have enough fuel on board you're free to keep your
| satellite for 50 years on the orbit. You just have to
| deorbit it within 5 after you stopped using it.
| Me1000 wrote:
| To be honest, this seems quite reasonable. Space is obviously a
| unique environment, but to use an imperfect analogy: we don't
| let cars that break down just sit in the middle of the road,
| and we don't let dilapidated buildings sit unattended until
| they collapse.
|
| There's an externality to leaving a EOL'd satellite in LEO, now
| these new rules require that externality be priced in. Either
| through the cost of reserving enough propellant for a de-orbit
| burn, or perhaps, one day, for more expensive satellites, a new
| industry could emerge for refueling/boosting/servicing to
| extend the sat's life.
|
| This regulation seems like a good sign that the commercial
| space industry is starting to mature in a healthy way.
| JaggedJax wrote:
| The future is here! I know of at least one company, Orbit
| Fab, who already has signed contracts for their in-orbit
| refueling service. It's a bit early to see how successful or
| profitable this will be though.
| danieldbird wrote:
| I know how small the debris is relative to the earth. But the
| sheer number. Would that have any effect on the sun reaching
| earth and it's heating / cooling?
| gpm wrote:
| No.
|
| To have an effect you need to launch multiple orders of
| magnitude more mass than we have, and that mass would need to
| be optimized towards having as large as an effect as possible
| by being very very thin film positioned so that it is
| consistently between earth and the sun (or you could add on a
| few more orders of magnitude).
|
| You can look at proposal for doing this intentionally to get a
| sense for the scale:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade
| xani_ wrote:
| Nope
| ultra_nick wrote:
| No, that's like trying to cool your house with a pinch of dust.
|
| Bus = 0.0002 km2
|
| Earth = 510.1 million km2
|
| (Earth / Bus) / 100 = 25,000,000,000 bus sized satellites
| needed to cover 1% of the sky.
| jmount wrote:
| The previous "de-orbing 25 years after mission completion" sound
| a deliberately unenforceable rule.
| rzimmerman wrote:
| It was enforced during licensing. In order to obtain a license
| from the FCC (which is effectively required to launch a
| satellite, unless you never want to communicate with it), you
| had to prove it would either deorbit naturally in < 25 years or
| that you had a system to do so at the end of the mission. The
| rule was generally to have a plan and an ability to deorbit
| after 25 years. A lot of satellites fail in ways that prevent
| using a propulsion system.
| kobalsky wrote:
| I'm not sure but I think has to do with parking the satellite
| in a lower orbit such that the atmospheric drag will force it
| to reenter within 25 years, not that the operator has 25 years
| to deorbit the satellite at some point.
|
| I think this has to do with the amount of fuel the need to save
| to reach the disposal orbit.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I expect that's less about having to reserve fuel or have a
| specific plan for it, and more that to get approval, you have
| to be able to plausibly show a model where the device will
| deorbit on its own within 25 years of no maintenance burns.
| Eleison23 wrote:
| One day we will need to pass laws against celebratory satellite
| launches on holidays and the urban microphone networks will be
| calibrated to detect heavy-lift launches by gangstas. New nations
| will enshrine the right to launch satellites in their
| constitutions. Elementary schools will go on lockdown when a
| student is discovered to have built a satellite and fuelled their
| boosters.
| kortex wrote:
| I wanted to know if this affects "graveyard orbits". Seems like
| this applies only to satellites in LEO, while MEO/GEO are exempt.
|
| > The Report and Order adopted today requires satellites ending
| their mission in or passing through the low-Earth orbit region
| (below 2,000 kilometers altitude) to deorbit as soon as
| practicable but no later than five years after mission
| completion.
| causi wrote:
| I'd like to see a breakdown of deorbiting fuel requirements with
| 25 years vs 5 years vs, say, 30 days.
| rzimmerman wrote:
| I'd expect the fuel required is generally the same, but this
| changes the altitude range for the question "do I need
| propulsion at all?" Satellites that would decay naturally in
| 6-10 years due to atmospheric drag would have satisfied the old
| rule. Now they need to install a propulsion system.
|
| The actual impact is probably small - there aren't that many
| satellites launching to those altitudes, and most of them
| probably have a propulsion system anyway. But for a university
| satellite this could be a big obstacle.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I wonder if they could do a "debris offset credits" type thing,
| where you could extend the life of your satellite by clearing out
| existing debris. So if you wanted a 25-year orbit, you could
| clear out maybe 5-10x the cross-sectional area, or mass, or
| whatever the relevant number is.
| itp wrote:
| The new rule is 5 years after mission completion, so this
| already allows for a 25-year orbit (as long as you're still
| operating).
| T3RMINATED wrote:
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Good improvement. What is China's rules for de-orbiting?
| Someone1234 wrote:
| It wouldn't surprise me if they wound up just copying this,
| making it a de-facto international standard. Space junk is an
| international problem, nobody wins by it continuously becoming
| worse.
|
| De-orbiting requirements add costs, but space junk damage and
| or avoidance systems are even more expensive, so this is the
| cheap solution in the medium to long term.
| bluGill wrote:
| I would expect that they put their own rules in places that
| are different enough to be annoying if you need to permission
| from both countries, but for practical purposes the end
| result is the same. It may or may not be possible to satisfy
| the letter of both countries rules though.
| rzimmerman wrote:
| I think this is generally a good thing to do, with some caveats
| that I hope the FCC considers.
|
| For most satellites below ~450km, this is really a non-issue.
| Atmospheric drag will generally be sufficient to deorbit the
| satellite in a few years. For big Earth-observing constellations,
| Starlink and friends, and many small missions, this doesn't
| change anything. Debris don't really accumulate dangerously in
| this zone and collision avoidance is a well-studied problem with
| a lot of people doing great work. The 18th SDS with the US Space
| Force, LeoLabs, Starlink/SpaceX, and a lot of other constellation
| operators take this very seriously and do a good job.
|
| For satellites in the 800km+ range, this is also not a meaningful
| change. The 25-year rule meant that these satellites needed a
| deorbit plan anyway. 800km is a rough estimate, in real life it
| depends on the satellite mass + geometry and the solar cycle.
|
| For satellites in the 450-800km range (again - hand waving here)
| this is actually a big deal. Satellites that would decay
| naturally between 5 and 25 years now need an active deorbit plan
| or need to launch lower and keep themselves up with propellant.
| Small satellite propulsion is becoming cheaper and more
| available, so this isn't that onerous for commercial operators.
| But I do worry a little about educational and non-profit
| launchers of satellites. They'd be excluded from using launches
| to this orbital range unless the FCC allows waivers (which I'm
| hopeful they will).
|
| Overall I don't think this has a particularly big impact. It's a
| sensible revision of an old rule that was a little too lax. But
| there aren't that many satellites launching at the high end of
| the 450-800km range without propulsion. The 1000km-2000km area is
| a more important area for debris mitigation and that was really
| already covered.
|
| As for the FCC having this jurisdiction vs. the FAA or the USSF,
| as Spock would say - "it is not logical, but it is true."
| ortusdux wrote:
| Several companies have been developing deorbit add-on modules,
| and I hope this requirement spurs on this growing industry. I
| would love it if it became the norm that satellites have a
| passive failsafe deorbit system that activates at after a set
| amount of time or if ground communications fail for a set
| duration.
|
| https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/sst-soa/deorbit-syst...
| elliekelly wrote:
| > Debris don't really accumulate dangerously in this zone and
| collision avoidance is a well-studied problem with a lot of
| people doing great work.
|
| I think this line of thinking is dangerously incorrect. Sure
| it's not a problem _right now_ but we're poised to have a lot
| more stuff in orbit than we've ever had before. Plastic waste
| didn't initially "accumulate dangerously" either but once it
| became more widely used (and _did_ accumulate dangerously) it
| was much more difficult to try to reign it back.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Debris does not accumulate in LEO, it reenters naturally.
| This isn't like plastic waste, it's more like organic waste
| that naturally decays. Sometimes the law says you have to
| clean up organic waste, but sometimes it's better to let it
| rot on its own.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| The timeframe varies _widely_ based on the shape of the
| object and the altitude. There are something like 5 orders
| of magnitude pressure difference between an object at 100km
| and one at 500km which is the difference between deorbiting
| in days vs years.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| There's probably more than 5 orders of magnitude
| difference between throwing an apple core into the woods
| and a city's worth of sewage, but both are organic waste.
| I think the analogy is fairly sound.
| Retric wrote:
| Huge constellations with stable orbits under active
| control are irrelevant. It's really the a pair of
| uncontrolled satellites colliding that's a meaningful
| risk, and that risk grows exponentially with age. To the
| point where the difference between 1 day and 1 year is
| effectively meaningless while the difference between 5
| years and 50 years is huge.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| If we're launching 15k satellites per year as some people
| expect, the difference between 1 day deorbit and 5 years
| deorbit is something like 75,000 satellites.
| Retric wrote:
| If the risk of collisions in both scenarios is sub
| 0.0001%, is it a meaningful difference? Very quickly the
| risk is dominated by being launched into the wrong orbit.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| yes, but if deorbiting in years is sufficient, the
| difference in time is not relevant.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| What? Starlink eventually wants 40,000 satellites - with
| 5 year lifetimes that'll be 8,000 per year... there are
| numerous other planned constellations, so figure
| something like 15,000 LEO per year within a few decades.
|
| 15k satellites per year with a 5 year lifespan and a
| 1-year decay means you'll be stable at 75k satellites. 5
| year lifespan with a 3-year decay means you'll eventually
| be stable at over 100k satellites in orbit with 30,000 of
| them 'dead' and decaying. That's a massive difference in
| collision risk.
| bisby wrote:
| The rule is 5 years. You've given 2 examples under 5
| years. If everything is going to re-enter within 5 years
| without boosting then your point is moot, because even in
| your "massively more collision risky" example, it still
| abides by the rules.
|
| If something was going to deorbit within 1 minute, or was
| going to deorbit within 4 years, 6 months... It doesn't
| matter to the creator, because they don't have to change
| their design at all to meet the rules.
|
| If something was going to deorbit within 8 years (because
| they previously had a 25 year allowed limit), they now
| have to rework the design.
|
| There's plenty of room for debate about if 5 years is
| adequate, but as it stands, _most_ things (under 500km)
| will naturally deorbit within the legal time frame anyway
| even without special consideration.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Just responding to a comment that said "If deorbiting in
| years is sufficient, the difference in time is not
| relevant" where it's obviously relevant.. this doesn't
| seem remotely controversial.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Let me put this another way, if I use my computer to send
| emails, it doesn't matter to me if my ping is 10
| milliseconds or 10 femtoseconds.
|
| One time is 10^12 times longer, but the difference does
| not matter to me. My emails are still sent and received
| faster than I can possibly perceived.
| bisby wrote:
| You're arguing a different thing. The topic was satellite
| design for satellites under 450km.
|
| If deorbiting in years is sufficient, the difference in 1
| minute vs 4 years is NOT relevant -> to a satellite
| builder worried about the law.
|
| If everything deorbits within 5 years, the only way for
| more things to accumulate is to launch things faster. But
| that's a separate discussion. If everything launched
| today is deorbited within 5 years, then in 5 years, all
| satellites will be new satellites launched after today.
| If everything launched today is deorbited within 5
| months, then in 5 years, all satellites will be new
| satellites launched after today. Deorbit speed under a
| threshold has no bearing on accumulation beyond that
| threshold.
|
| If SpaceX launches a trillion Starlink satellites, and
| they all deorbit within a year, then yes. it's going to
| be a very crowded year, and we'll have to drastically
| rethink how much stuff we have in LEO, but at the same
| time SpaceX would not be in violation of the 5 year
| deorbit window, so the issue is about how much stuff
| we're sending up, and not how fast it de-orbits.
|
| "Amount of junk below 450km, total" and "Amount of junk
| below 450km, that hasn't deorbited after 5 years" are
| very different things. You're making points about total,
| while the original point was about deorbit speed.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >That's a massive difference in collision risk.
|
| Is it? It's a big difference in absolute numbers but that
| doesn't mean it's a meaningful difference in Risk.
|
| If both numbers are quite small relative to the level of
| concern, the difference can still be irrelevant.
|
| My point is that it takes more than just looking at the
| number of satilites to understand risk. You need to do
| the work to show how the collision chance compares to
| what an acceptable limit might be. Both cases could be
| very acceptable (or both cases could be unacceptable).
| hinkley wrote:
| In this case it's policy reflecting Little's Law:
| population = arrival rate X duration of visit
|
| If suddenly someone wants to launch twice as many satellites,
| you either have to reduce tenancy or accept a higher
| population in the system. If you have a policy that's at most
| 25 years and a lot of satellites de-orbit in say 15 years on
| average, you can still triple your launches by pulling that
| down to 5.
|
| I am worried though, do we really build satellites that are
| expected to only work for 5 years? Are we disincentivizing
| people from building 20 year satellites this way?
| Fatnino wrote:
| I assume it means deorbit within 5 years after the
| satellite is decommissioned.
| ntrz wrote:
| The article says "5 years after completing their mission",
| not 5 years after launch.
| hahajk wrote:
| time to assign 25 year missions to satellites built to
| last 10 years!
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQT5aMa_7iI
|
| "Gabbard Diagram for Low Earth Orbit 1959-2021"
|
| See how the stuff in the lower left corner speeds up towards
| the lower left corner? That's low flying debris falling out
| of space.
| wpietri wrote:
| I am generally allergic to video, but that was fascinating
| to watch. Thanks for sharing it.
| rzimmerman wrote:
| I didn't mean to imply orbit debris isn't a real problem. But
| for the low end of LEO:
|
| - Most debris deorbits naturally in a few years. Any debris
| causing events or accumulation naturally clears out in a
| reasonable time frame. It's not like debris at 800-2000km
| which is the real "Kessler Syndrome" concern where it takes
| decades or centuries.
|
| - Debris mitigation efforts that are already in place are
| effective. Limiting debris release during launch and
| deployments has had a huge positive impact over the last few
| decades.
|
| - "Traffic control" is a lot easier at these altitudes and
| debris in this range is well tracked. Obviously this doesn't
| extend to small stuff (<5cm), but due to active mitigation
| and natural decay this is less of an issue. Also ground
| radars are getting better and can actually see a lot of these
| objects now.
| hinkley wrote:
| How high can the debris loft after a particularly nasty
| collision?
|
| Two satellites hitting at an acute angle should produce a cone
| of debris in front of them, of which about a third deorbits and
| a third goes up into a higher orbit that's an average of the
| two.
|
| Two satellites that hit at an obtuse angle, well, they pancake
| and produce a donut of debris. The stuff headed straight up is
| on a parabolic orbit that will hit the atmosphere on the way
| back down, but in the meantime any other satellite that crosses
| paths with it is effectively hitting a wall of stationary
| debris, creating a new cone that ladders up higher. Is there
| enough space that the ladder stops, or does it just keep
| building?
| FairlyInvolved wrote:
| I don't think debris 'going higher' isn't much of a problem.
| Whenever this happens the orbit is going to be more eccentric
| - meaning a lower periapsis, and consequentially lots of drag
| that will cause a rapid deorbit.
|
| On the second point about parabolic orbits I also find that
| probably relatively low risk because we are only talking
| about a fraction of an orbit for a collision to occur so
| unless the debris field was massive the chance of another
| collision is probably still low. Remember when we are
| modelling orbit collisions normally we are often talking over
| 25+ years - 100,000 + orbits.
|
| I think the main problem is busy orbits (e.g. sun-synchronous
| polar orbits at popular altitudes) where most of the debris
| remains roughly in the same orbit following an acute
| collision but has a lot of other potential collision targets.
| Also as satellites are disabled by a collision they lose the
| ability to avoid other objects already in the same crowded
| orbit - i.e. the fraction of objects able to take avoidance
| decreases increasing the chance that future collisions are
| from 2 incapacitated satellites, removing the possibility of
| avoidance.
| jessaustin wrote:
| Angular momentum is subject to a conservation law.
| exabrial wrote:
| It's a bit weird the FCC is ruling on this... not really a space
| agency... but regardless, it's a good move!
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(page generated 2022-09-30 23:00 UTC)