SpaceX Whines About Space Collisions After Gutting Regulators That Oversee That Sort Of Thing

Michael Nicolls, SpaceX's vice president for Starlink and president of xAI, appeared recently at the International Astronautical Congress in Turkey to lament the rise of space collisions as Musk and Bezos flood the night sky with low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. According to Nicolls, there's been a decided lack of coordination among space companies as they've rushed LEO satellites into orbit (sans any meaningful regulatory oversight), resulting in multiple recent near-collisions:

Once you can track this debris, and if you can track it well, these are like obstacles on a road. If you can measure them, you can predict where they're going to be, and you can avoid them," Nicolls said. What you can't avoid is other operators who maneuver without telling you where they're going to go. We have many examples of this on Starlink, unfortunately."

Both Bezos and Musk have only really begun to launch tens of thousands of expected LEO satellites, so the coordination problems we're seeing now are just the very beginning.

Starlink satellites perform around 1,000 collision avoidance maneuvers per day to avoid other satellites or space debris. According to Nicolls, Starlink satellites have avoided collisions with around 650 active satellites, without only half of those satellite owners engaging in ephemeris sharing with SpaceX. Some avoid sharing this location and movement data out of fear that it will compromise competitive information.

As a result, there's been a surge in examples where other company's satellites got too close for comfort":

Either they were not publishing their ephemeris to us, or they were not considering the ephemeris of others when they were maneuvering, and these led to conjunctions of tens of meters to hundreds of meters," Nicolls said. Way too close to [sic] comfort."

If only there were... say... some sort of government bodies tasked with overseeing the rise in space junk and orbital debris, helping industry coordinate launches and navigation, and penalizing bad actors who repeatedly engage in bad behavior that can't be deterred through industry collaboration?

U.S. regulators had historically had a hands-off approach to regulating space, though more recent incarnations of the FCC had just begun implementing some actual guidelines - like this 2022 proposal by the Biden FCC that implemented a five year limit for letting your dead satellite stick around in space. That was matched with FCC actions to finalize penalize companies that bungle de-orbits.

You're to ignore that Elon Musk's takeover of the U.S. government - and subsequent butchering of numerous regulatory initiatives he wasn't empathic or smart enough to understand - will directly contribute to all manner of chaos, both terrestrial or otherwise. Musk's cash helped contribute to gentlemen like Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr, who spends most of his time taking a giant dump on the first amendment or gutting consumer protections and corporate oversight.

Nicolls also laments the lack of cooperation with China, which is increasingly difficult given the overt hostility, protectionism, and xenophobia of a Trump administration heavily propped up by Musk cash.

In addition to space junk, scientific researchers have warned for years that Elon Musk's Starlink LEO constellations areharming research. The light pollution (Musk claimedwould never happen in the first place)is making it far more difficult to study the night sky, a problem researchers say can bemitigated somewhat but never fully eliminated.

The massive repeated launch and de-orbiting of LEO satellites at scale is also introducing a massive amount of burning heavy metals into the atmosphere that scientists say are actively degrading progress made on restoring the ozone layer. Thanks to Musk and his autocrats, regulators are now largely incapable of protecting the public from these growing harms as well.

Despite the apparent belief that government exists exclusively to steal peoples' money and stifle innovation, these government agencies can and do contribute massively to the public good. Often invisibly, if they're doing their jobs well. When they aren't doing their jobs well it's often because they're being lobotomized through the kind of mindless deregulation Musk supports.

Then when companies and industries complain that there's perhaps more anticompetitive shenanigans and market chaos than there should be - they refuse to connect the dots back to their own actions. And they're helped by a press (notice this Ars Technica piece never even brings up Musk companies' history of undermining government) that doesn't have much interest in pressing the issue.