Will Starlink go down if Starship explodes in orbit?
In 2009, hundreds of miles above Siberia, an active US commercial satellite called the Iridium 33 collided with the defunct Russian satellite Kosmos 2251, shattering both into a cloud of thousands of pieces of debris. #Space law #Topic of War
Just two years prior, a Chinese weather satellite called the FengYun-1C was intentionally destroyed in an anti-satellite missile test, blasting out a cloud of over 3,000 debris fragments.
While some debris eventually burned up in the atmosphere, much of it remains in orbit today, alongside hundreds of thousands of other pieces of space junk that endanger everything orbiting Earth, from navigational satellites to space stations.
Last year, a debris fragment struck a crew spacecraft docked at China’s Tiangong space station. This incident triggered an emergency rescue protocol and pushed back the timeline of subsequent missions.
Tracking and evading space junk is one of the main operational hurdles for the ever-growing swarm of internet satellite constellations in low Earth orbit, a charge led by Elon Musk’s Starlink.
While Starlink has a major head start with over 10,000 internet satellites currently in orbit, China is actively building rival mega-constellations that will make low Earth orbit even more crowded.
But if the break-up of satellites measuring only a few metres across and weighing less than a metric ton can launch thousands of fragments around the planet, what would happen if something much bigger exploded?
Elon Musk’s #SpaceX 🚀 is currently testing its Starship spacecraft, which Nasa plans to use to ferry astronauts to and from the lunar surface. To make the trip, a human lander variant of the spacecraft will first need to dock with orbital tanker variants in low Earth orbit to transfer propellant, which Nasa has said would need to happen multiple times.
During the first test flight of the combined Starship and Super Heavy booster launch system in April 2023, the two exploded minutes after liftoff after failing to separate, sending debris raining down into the Gulf of Mexico.
Since then, multiple other launch failures and explosions have led some online users to raise the question of what could happen if Starship were to explode in orbit.
Estimates put the dry mass of the roughly 50-metre-tall (164 feet) Starship spacecraft at around 100 tonnes, with the capacity to carry at least that much in payload. Once fully loaded with fuel, the ship could weigh over 1,500 tonnes – around three times more than the International Space Station.
If such an event occurred, the debris it could generate would join the many other pieces that already threaten the operational lifespans of internet satellite constellations.
According to regular reports that SpaceX files to the US Federal Communications Commission, Starlink satellites already perform hundreds of thousands of collision avoidance manoeuvres each year, dodging both space debris and other defunct and operational satellites.
As Earth’s orbit grows increasingly crowded, risks of collision are rising. A major crash or explosion generating more debris could push us closer to Kessler Syndrome: a catastrophic chain reaction of collisions in space.
As the race to return humans to the Moon heats up, alongside the commercial rush to fill Earth’s orbit with satellites, one wrong move could threaten our ability to explore space beyond our planet.
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