The Truth Behind ESA & SpaceX's Close Encounter
Вставка
- Опубліковано 10 вер 2024
- The headlines spoke of 'Rogue SpaceX Satellites' and 'Emergency Course Changes' - but making avoidance maneuvers is a regular occurrence when operating lots of satellites. So what should we make of ESA's twitter thread making a big deal about their decision to avoid a close encounter with Starlink 44?
In Space, no one can hear you beeping the horn....
Orbital road rage
Next time on COPS.
'Spaceforce' is starting to make more sense to me now...
rpbsjy Well there is that astronaut recently accused of " Improperly accessing her estranged wife's bank account from the space station. " .
Generic Dave Naa, Scott felt a disturbance in the force and needed to take evasive action just as the satelite did however one of those darn faulty reaction wheels caused him to overshoot.. It's that or he thought he was on the USS Enterprise during evasive maneuvers.
Could be worse... imagine if the ISP in question was Comcast rather than SpaceX.
_"Your satellite is going to hit the space station!"_
"Would you like to purchase a protection package upgrade?"
Idk if twas a comcast it would be probably geostatic
Isn't an upgrade package better than no option at all. "Meh fuck it, get out of the way"
Then you agree to pay it and they schedule the upgrade exactly 2 weeks after the projected impact...
_"We can send a technician to adjust the orbit of our satellite next Thursday between the hours of 9 AM and 1 PM."_
"For an extra $20 per month, we can add services that the FCC says we aren't obligated to deliver. For an extra $50 per month (12 month introductory rate), we can bundle semaphore and Morse-code communications. However, you will be obliged to rent capacity on one of our proprietary deep-space communication stations, since the regular ones don't interoperate with our legacy technology. Plus, your traffic will have to traverse our special routers, so that we can sell your orbital data to 3rd parties. All perfectly legal."
I hope that bonk didn't have a negative effect on your aerodynamic effeciency
battlekruiser If he bonks his head a lot, he could take advantage of a low friction boundary layer a la golf ball
Scott's head didn't "fly safe!"
To Brits, 'bonk' means something other than a sub-orbital impact. So since Scott used the word bonk, I wonder if he smacked his head on the roof, or the headboard...
battlekruiser no air in space vro
Волк
They should roll D20s to decide who moves, it's the only proper way to decide.
"rolls initiative"
'1'
Every satellite will be playing Galaxian.
Absolutely, but does the oldest satellite (that’s not de-orbiting) get advantage on initiative? And when does acrobatics come into play? 😉
surely the proper way to do it is Bo3 Rock, Paper Scissors, Lizard, Spock
@@SF-tb4kb meh, can't add modifiers to a coin-toss.
Apparently your collision avoidance software failed to notify you of an impending collision for your head. Perhaps that is a good thing because I doubt accelerating forward would have worked in your case.
His head is so big and knowledge so vast it would be impossible to move the required amount to avoid a collision.😁
As a fellow baldy heid I can tell you that his "collision avoidance software" fell out (your hair actually acts to some extent as a collision warning, kind of like a cat's whiskers, so as you feel it touch a surface your reflexes are already starting to try to slow down/avoid contact - after it's gone, bumps to your head tend to be a bit harder than before and particularly early on, they happen more often too).
I think ESA reacted this harshly exactly, because Starlink is supposed to be such massive constellation. Probably thinking "If they can't handle it properly with 60, how bad is it with 10 000." So giving them a slap on the frist publicly to go "hey,hey, SpaceX, yeah you guys planning to do a 10 000 constellation, yeah you, LIGHT ON THE WALL, TENTACLES UP, WAKE UP, this kind of thing won't fly with handling 10000 satellites. You don't get to have oopsies, forget things or be sleep on the wheel with that large constellation on deploy"
Totally fair analysis,
Doesnt change that they hae to move their satelites quite a lot. Means that the other operators do not handle their crafts properly?
I doubt SpaceX cares if one or two collide. They probably just did not care if the satellite crashed. Only the other guys cared.
@@mravecsk1 It means nothing without context: are the evasive manoeuvres due to debris, inactive satellites, or other operational satellites? Has there been any previous communication with the operator in case of the latter? Etc.
More likely they thought, if we bash Space-X some people might find out we exist...
Oh no Scott’s aerodynamic nose cone has collided with construction materials
We need to run an unscheduled analysis to check if the onboard computer inside is still functioning
He's an youtuber. We already have the answer to that question.
Yea Scott....we’re gonna need a sample of your brain tissue.... OK!
Running diagnostics...
Perhaps his gyros needed recalibration?
I find the way ESA handled this quite nice. There's an actively interested public on Twitter for this stuff so it's ideal to get heard without making a big deal out of it. After all it's only on Twitter.
That was basically them honking their horn yelling "hey stupid".
It's like when you try to avoid someone in a hallway but you both keep stepping in the same direction, some sort of co-ordination will be required eventually.
"Good thing i didn't collide anything at orbital speed" -Scott Manley
Fly Safe
But we are orbiting the sun, so he did collide at orbital speed.
Implying absolute reference frame exist. :)
I would say the pre-existing satellite has priority; nothing against SpaceX or in favor of ESA
Especially when the second satellite is about to get dumped and deemed worthless at that point.
Unless the de-orbiting satellite is malfunctioning and/or is trying to hit a specific re-entry window to splash down at Point Nemo. Whereas, a satellite intending to stay in orbit loses nothing by gaining a bit of altitude, since it has to do that periodically anyway.
@@thePronto valid points as well. Looks like a complicated rule book needs to be setup.
@@thePronto in that case you inform ASAP the other part that your sat is a derelict you can't control, not playing the smartass.
@@z33r0now3 Oh dear, space law is going to be a thing soon.
The KSP Space Station on his monitor isn't a Picture...
oh KSP... the space sketchpad
Sneakily alpha testing KSP2 ....
what? how?
@@gonun69 It's probably a joke, it's just KSP with graphical mods
Nice F2 Scotty.
I think the big complaint was the lack of communication if both parties change orbits by the same amount without telling each other, the collision still happens.
John Burr To add to that both are likely to make similar manoeuvres (well neither would want to lower their orbits at any rate). Absolute insanity... Starting to worry that SpaceX are becoming very inconsiderate to other space users...
@@jcskyknight2222 similar maneuvers will not likely result in maintaining a collision course. In fact it's all but guaranteed that they wont collide at least on that orbit since both will be on different headings already.
That’s what happened with the Uberlingen midair collision in 2002. Both planes went toward each other, because of miscommunication and different protocols. It killed 71.
It would be very easy to establish an aviodance protocol requiring no communication. The orbital equivalent to "both vessels give way to the right."
bcubed72 Unfortunately, as Scott points out, they don’t really veer sideways like that. The easiest avoidance maneuver is for one to boost speed slightly to vault over the other, but that doesn’t work if both try it. So if you get no response from the approaching object, you need to blindly perform your avoidance maneuver and hope they continue playing dead.
How long before you end up in a situation where everyone is tracking everyone else’s satellites and companies start playing chess as in if I move my old satellite to this position then the other company is going to have to move several of theirs wasting fuel and shortening the life of the competition and when it’s automatic who would know?
"Passive agressive AIs slowly pushing each other off of their chairs without touching each other" sounds just mundane enough to happen.
If you can't communicate with less than 100 of objects
And they plan to got to thousands...
I can see why to be pissed and call out on such things..
There must be some minium standards about that
But on the other hand, ESA also didn't want to move their satellite until they understood that SpaceX isn't going to move.
@@biplabkumarghosh6300 Your other hand is quite empty - the problem is lack of communication - something that could become a much larger problem in the future.
No communication and both make an collision avoiding manoeuvre - thats just wasteful in general and leaves a crazy low probably event that they will still end up on danger zone.
Why should ESA spend their propellant? Especially considering the colliding satellite was not on their initial planned orbit - back then even seemingly on their path to deorbiting - meaning that they have propellant that is not really needed to prolong satellites life
It seems that Starlink 44 is still in orbit
Hey Scott Manley, there's a petition going on online to have you voice the ksp2 tutorial as Scott Kerman. Would you do it if the devs asked you to.
He responded in the discord. Long story short, he'd like to but he doesn't want to force the devs to do anything.
Been playing for two days.
And very new to the channel.
Lol that the voice I read the tutorial in my head.
Can you post the link to the petition please :)
Scott, thank you for clearing up those misconceptions. I definitely was under the impression that collision avoidance maneuvers were a left and right type of maneuver
These automatic satellite collision avoidance systems remind me of Neal Stephenson's "Seveneves" where they develop a software that keeps the "pod swarm" behind Izzy without them colliding into each other.
Great book by the way.
"Sir. SpaceX satellite approaching."
"Intensify the forward firepower!"
"Too laaaaaate."
His name was Arvel Crynyd
Due to a glitch in their automated reply system SpaceX failed to respond to complaint. Sounds like Tesla customer service.
🛰"space x? Hello, here is ESA, we have an emergency!!.........hello?"...... 👨"hello,my name is Rakesh Tilakram, so, you tried to put gas in your Tesla?"
@@venturestar Droll, not troll. I never troll. Do make the very occasional droll comment. Am a big Elon Musk fan and supporter of all his endeavors to give us a survivable future.
@paul m Just joking around,but you always meet some butt hurt triggered elon defenders who feel pretty comfortable,up there in elons butt hole.
@@venturestar clearly you've never had the misfortune of interacting with Tesla customer service when they're busy
Ok, esa and spacex both had what looks like sufficient advanced notice (about 3 days). Nither of the ordital controllers tried to contact eachothers orbital controllers when they "should" have eachothers phone number for this sort of thing. They wouldnt have to send "tickets". Sounds to me like a case of the "CLASSIFIED/REDACTED", "Im not going to give away my trade secrets", or AKA pre-kesslerities.
Edit -fixed sentence logic
Orbital Bonk sounds like a band from the KSP universe
Sounds like a crossover between KSP and TF2
Bonk is slang for something very different here in Britain...
@@jeffvader811 Sounds like when the Mile High Club advances to the Kármán Line Club ;)
@@PinataOblongata
1000 years in the future it'll be the Kuiper belt club ;)
@@PinataOblongata
Might I add that your profile pic is extremely apt.
``satellite collision evasion is huge game of chicken and most of it is against something that can't move`` - it reminds me of an anecdote:
- “Please divert your course 15 degrees to the North to avoid a collision.”
- “Recommend you divert YOUR course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision.”
- “This is the captain of a US Navy ship. I say again, divert YOUR course.”
- “No, I say again, you divert YOUR course.”
- “THIS IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN, THE SECOND LARGEST SHIP IN THE UNITED STATES’ ATLANTIC FLEET. I DEMAND THAT YOU CHANGE YOUR COURSE 15 DEGREES NORTH.
- “This is a lighthouse. Your call.”
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." - and yet they managed to almost bump into each other... bonkers!
The reason lighthouse ships (or lightships) were mostly replaced in Europe with onshore lighthouses were actually captains who rammed them because they thought they have the right of the way.
DemoGorgonZola Well, space is big, but Earth’s close orbit is...well, still big. It’s just not THAT big.
We're already almost up to 20k uncontrollable debris flying around in those orbits, and its only going to increase.
@@requen Yes. And the more collisions, the more debris. It's a cascading effect to the point where nobody can launch a satellite because it will crash into debris.
0.1% is a very generous definition of "almost"
I really cannot say what SpaceX was trying to do but they should have communicated with ESA no matter what (Bug in the email system?). That is the reason ESA send out the tweet and also the reason the media is taking this situation seriously. This Satellite incident may not be a big deal but how SpaceX handled the situation shows a potential threat to the future space. Hope now you will see the whole picture.
X: I think you are in my parking space.
Y: No, this is MY parking space.
X: You should move your car.
Y: Why? This is my parking space.
Nowhere do we see any discussion between the two parties that would lead to any logical decision. Please share the inside information that you have that shows how SpaceX handled this situation, such as transcripts of actual conversations.
did you read their statement? They did communicate with ESA originally.
But as Scott said, they are the first satellites of SpaceX; they will handle the situation better next time and set up a collision avoidance system anyway.
From my understanding there was communication between the two as it was decided a course correction was not needed but a bug prevented spacex from getting an update in collision stats.
- Approximately 500,000 marble-sized debris and 100,000,000 objects of 1mm and smaller are estimated to pose a risk to spaceflight according to ODPO from NASA.
- There are currently 4987 satellites in space orbiting the Earth according to UNOOSA, just under 40% of them are working. Which means 60% of these satellites can't manoeuvre
- SpaceX has plans to deploy nearly 12,000 satellites in three orbital shells by the mid-2020s. When this incident occured it had about 60 of them in orbit if I'm not mistaken.
- If you put two and two together I think it's fair game from ESA to make a big deal out of it in public. It's better to be aware of the problems and try to do something about the risks now then to wait untill something happens (as we usually do because, well, money)
None of the big agencies want to do anything about the risks though, just come up with ways to avoid them. There's no profit in an actual solution for the companies and it would require the governments to not be lazy
You know the feeling when two people cross paths in the street, but both choose to evade the same way, so they both have to evade again and again.
Glad this didn't happen here...
This just popped into my head: If I ever start playing _Kerbal Space Program,_ I think the FIRST spaceship I create will be called *_"Kessler Syndrome 1"._*
😝😝😝
Is the destruction of Fengyun 1C the cause of the spike in the graph in 2007?
Yes
while 2009 is the Iridium-Kosmos collision.
was wondering this
The dynamics of orbital debris are a bit trick. 100 m is actually quite small. The uncertainty of these measurements is pretty high, so they usually want at least 1 km difference. Also, the extent is important, the body of the spacecraft might only be 1 m, but antennas and solar panels extend quite a bit further than that.
Moreover, the game of chicken is overdone. If you do this a day in advance, the amount of fuel used in absolutely negligible, it is of advantage to do this as quickly as possible.
1/2 an orbit in advance, not a day in advance.
@@rupert274 Half an orbit is what WAS done, but often these can be done much further in advance. A day out is pretty common. If you play Close Approach Chicken, however, the amount of fuel required goes way up.
@@WhereisRoadster Orbital mechanics say half an orbit is cheapest ;). A day can mean anything.
@@Dreamland1981 Half an orbit is not cheapest, not unless you are trying to reenter or something. If you do a slow change 24 hours in advance, you will have it be magnified with time quite a bit, much less so half an orbit in advance.
I can already see the two AIs of two space agencies playing rock paper scissors to determine which needs to move their satellite.
what if they get stuck in a draw-loop?
@@timgreller Inevitable crash
@@timgreller then their plan will work perfectly, the ai will give earth the keppler syndrome and the robot uprising will begin.
I fly, I die, I live again, witness me NASA!
@@timgreller Exponential backoff is the accepted collision-avoidance protocol -- on Ethernet.
Haha ethernet protocol in space. Just send everything everywhere and if theres a collision launch again some time later.
Thanks Scott. I saw this pop up in my news feed and figured the headline was blown out of proportion. So I decided to not read it and wait for you to comment on it.
Aye, Twitter is an echo chamber of insanity so much it's better to wait for people that actually do the research to find out what's up
Even very minor scalp wounds tend to bleed profusely. Glad you're okay, Scott!
The newer satellite needs to give way to the older.
The older satellite may have less propellant available for maneuvering. Similar to sailing where leeward boat has right of way (assuming same tack)
Thank you! 👍
In this case, the older sat was on the way to deorbit
I would think that in this situation it's better to, where possible, use the fuel of the retiring sat
That way you help extend the mission life of the newer
That said, this only really works if one is retiring
In most circumstances, your rule is certainly a better one
@@347Jimmy Nope, Aeolus is the older satelite and was staying up, the deorbiting one was the SpaceX one
@@paulsilagi4783 indeed, I've mixed things up there
I guess the distinction of 'retiring sat' still applies
@@347Jimmy It absolutely does, and I think your exception is still a good one, it just doesn't apply in this specific case
It probably is also worth noting that ESA's budget review is coming up, and they definitely want to secure more funding towards things like the AI collision avoidance. SpaceX's communication issues were less than nominal, but there's definitely other things at work there.
Maybe maritime regulations are the precedent to follow. OK, red and green navigation lights are no use but the idea underlying them makes sense- When two vessels approach, both know who has right of way- with the other required to alter course- and equally important, in which direction the course alteration should be. While stuff like "Vessel on port tack" doesn't translate directly, it shouldn't be beyond the wit of man to come up with some simple principles.
The Starlink was on planned descent path, on the other hand the ESA sat is new and is about to keep or even rise its orbit for a while. So it is not a rocket science to decide who should go higher and who stays below.
It was probably done to highlight the problem of orbital overcrowding and space junk. AND THE IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNICATION. If SpaceX doesn't know their satellite is going to hit something it is a problem for StarLink in the future. So highlighting it now is better than doing so after there are tens of thousands more satellites in space. Also it will probably mean that everyone is going to need to invest in better tracking technology, so you can calculate the odds more precisely, since with more satellites in way they will grow as hell. I try to imagine what will be in 50 years. I can't.
No need for a Twitter post. Plus first up/moves last
Space Link will have twice as many satillites than they need. Thousands of back ups. Theyll clear a path for the replacements, no biggie.
@@twothreefour234 How? Because de-orbiting to the ground is not always possible. And moving it to graveyard orbit risks overcrowding it.
I think the problem was more that ESA had its orbit and informed SpaceX about the potential collision and SpaceX just shrugged it of with a reply (the first one ever to ESA) with 'Well, we not gonne move' like a bully. The internal communication issues were brought up later after the press got wind of it, so... Anyway, there need to be some more coordination in the future IMHO.
And SpaceX has a fan cult that will come in their defense at every opportunity. Good on ESA to stand up for themselves here.
If there is not any answer, what if they BOTH move in such a way as to make them collide? There should be hefty fines for no response. They NEED to communicate!
I would hope there's some kind of standard direction they change their orbits so this can't happen. Like in a boat you turn right to avoid collision.
Now we are into the "Two Generals" problem...
I'm sure I'm gonna feel dumb when you tell me, but what is the thing at the right of Scott's shirt? I cannot figure it out.
Yeah! I'd like to know as well :D
Arm
I don't get it. If they had a glitch with their automated response system... why not just call them? The number is on the website. I'm sure if you say "oh hey, this is ESA, one of your satellites is on a collision course with ours" would get you to talk to the relevant person.
SpaceX did not realize their was a problem. ESA did but could not get to SpaceX
Man that debris animation was intense. Not getting prettier. Fascinating background info!
From what I've read this is less about ESA complaining about SpaceX than it is about ESA trying to shine a light on how inadequate and slow the current manual avoidance "system" is and how much worse it will get as the number of satellites begins to grow dramatically. They are trying to point out that this will need to be mostly automated in the future and are hoping those in power will get the ball rolling on that sooner rather than later.
Especially since SpaceX only have 60 sats but plan to have 2,500...
@@krashd and SpaceX isn't the only one with a mega-constellation in the works either.
Reminds me of the old joke that goes like this...
Believe it or not...this is the transcript of an actual radio conversation between a US naval ship and Canadian authorities off the coast of Newfoundland in October 1995. The Radio conversation was released by the Chief of Naval Operations on Oct. 10, 1995.
US Ship: Please divert your course 0.5 degrees to the south to avoid a collision.
CND reply: Recommend you divert your course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision.
US Ship: This is the Captain of a US Navy Ship. I say again, divert your course.
CND reply: No. I say again, you divert YOUR course!
US Ship: THIS IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS CORAL SEA*, WE ARE A LARGE WARSHIP OF THE US NAVY. DIVERT YOUR COURSE NOW!!
CND reply: This is a lighthouse. Your call.
😂👍
SpaceX should start a “make a satellite, take a satellite” program where they clean up 1 piece of space debris for satellite they put in orbit. In fact, everyone should be required to do this. They don’t necessarily have to be the ones to deorbit the debris, they could always pay someone else to do it.
The map showed is overrated. Sattelites are not that big
Hey Scott -- I'm a retired pure math guy and find all your shows to be very entertaining and extremely interesting. You are magically aware of the precise level of technical detail that your audience can easily digest. How refreshing! I am unhappy to report that I profoundly miss hearing your old outro music (the really cool original track with heavily reverbed pizzicato strings backed by bass and drums). Would it be possible for you to please restore your traditional outro on future shows?
Please keep up the good work!
"I'm Scott Manley, DIY safe..."
Most collision avoidance (COLA) manouveres in GEO are resolved by the satellite on-station skipping over a stationkeeping manoeuvre to drift out of the way. JSPOC are pretty good at warning us but they don't coordinate between operators.
ESA is rightfully annoyed. This manuver cut the mission short by one boost, while Space X is obviously deorbiting this malfunctioning satelite. It's propellant is not going to be used to maintain mission altitude, so it would have literally cost nothing for them to move out of the way. They deserve the bad publicity they get for this, as their decision was very immature and unreasonable.
Your grammar is top notch. Grüße aus München.
I would choose the ESA Earth observation satellite which gives us very useful data over a 1000 SpaceX commercial Internet ones.
But nobody had to make that choice...
Luckily not. But the point is, not all satellites are equal.
@@MikePerreman Eventually they will have to decide these kinds of traffic rules because it will be the basis of automating collision avoidance. Once huge constellations are reality, a system that has sats communicate with and avoid each other will be the best and really only feasible way to manage so many objects up there. I imagine it will look a lot like how autonomous cars will avoid each other in the future, just in 3d space.
The rule could be even simpler: the cheaper satellite should give way. Imagine a situation where a $100,000 CubeSat was on a collision course with the $5 billion Hubble Space Telescope. If the toy were able to change its course, it absolutely should.
@@arctic_haze A system that lets more expensive satellites always have the right of way could definitely lead to abuse. The main reason why you would not want to move is to save your fuel for station keeping. The way you prevent a collision is by ensuring that they don't both end up at the same place at the same time. It doesn't have to be one satellite moves or the other. One of them could speed up or slow down or they could split the change in velocity between the two craft. It's a pretty interesting problem to solve and I'm sure there is even more situations I haven't thought of that might be tricky to figure out. The solution should be elegant and fair to everyone since space belongs to everyone equally.
5:17
What the heck happened in 2006/7?
It spikes up so much in the debris graph. Did something explode?
China tested an anti satellite missile in 2007, then in 2008 there is a smaller spike from an American test.
Finally the 2009 uptick could be caused by the collision of Iridium 33 and Kosmos-2251.
The idiot chinese thought it would be a good idea to intentionally spray low earth orbit with about 30,000 pieces of debris.
Thanks to both of you.
@@rapophie9228 that is true, however, I would put the events in reversed order to signify the impact of Kosmos/Irridium collision on number of tracked debris
There have obviously been a few posts about this non-incident but I find myself automatically clicking on yours for a realistic analysis Mr Manley. Long story short I find you as the most credible source. My go to for all things space.
So, you had to bash your head to provide an intro? Wow! DEDICATION!
Somewhere near the middle of this started to remind me of a podcast I listened to with some possible future exchange between two people over the radio asking each other to move going back and forth for a while then one of them finally saying, something like no you move, we are the moon. I may be remembering that slightly off but it was pretty much that.
I somehow first heard: "Good thing is, I didn't lose any orbital velocity." 😄
*Head = orb*
*Orbital velocity = smartness/intelligence*
Lmao!
10:43 Time to start *operation snowglobe*
I dont know what it is but there should definitely be a space mission with that title.
They should decide who moves with Rock , Paper , Scissor , Lizard , Spock
I like how Scott says not to worry about him colliding with something at orbital velocity, when one of the suggested videos is him colliding things at orbital velocity in ksp...
Amazing how fast the Vega rocket accelerates
The magic of solids.
Hey scott i have a random question. If someone shot a bullet in space is it posible for it to reach orbital velocity ?
I have a question... Is it even possible to shoot a gun in space? Maybe a stoner moment but on earth we have oxygen... which I'd guess allows the powder to ignite, creating energy ultimately moving the bullet. but.. in space there is no oxygen so would it just go ''tink' when you pull trigger and nothing happens?? Surely you'd need some special propellant with oxygen included in the casing for the round.. Just like the fuel in a rocket.. God damn my brain I'm so confused now, i came here for answers, Not this!! Lol
Imo public missions should have right of way before private ones
Gokatgo More realistic is adapting a variation of the rules for ships on the open ocean. There's a list of rules as to when to pass on the left or right depending on the size of ships, propulsion type, wind direction (if either is wind powered) etc.
Right. Screw the guy who builds space systems others find useful and will voluntarily pay for for the benefit of a largely unaccountable political entity which gets its money through coercion and spends it on spy satellites to mess in other countries' affairs.
Whatever system is chosen the most important thing is that the rules are followed internationally. I go sailing a lot, and we're supposed to have right of way over motor boats, but the amount of times people completely ignore that rule is staggering.
We need to mandate the de-orbit of future sats AND develop space tugs to collect old sats and de-orbit them. We need to start cleaning up our mess. If we are required to do as many collision avoidance moves as we do now imagine when SpaceX and perhaps a few other space based comm/internet companies launch an additional 12K sats per company -- we need to get this de-orbit requirement and space tug NOW.
And outlaw satellite takedown tests, like the chinese one that made that huge 2007 spike. Especially at high orbits where debris don't deorbit that easily. Debris from that test already killed a Russian small satellite.
That ESA Rocket at 1:36 took off so fast
Aeolus is a small satellite, and is launched on the Vega rocket, which has solid propellant engines with very high acceleration (about 2.5g at liftoff).
So, the solution is simple: just lower the framerate of the universe, and they'll simply pass eachother between frames!
"Q"ute!
Tell the new Kerbal devs to make a convex hull between 2 frames and do the collision detection with that.
That won't be enough. What you need to do is called raycasting. Basically you calculate a line between where the object is and where it was, and check if any object intersects the line.
@@iamjimgroth Convex hull is that with the whole volume, it's strictly more accurate, if the colliders are non-trivial shapes (eg. donuts) significantly so!
@@SimonBuchanNz Oh, my mistake. I thought he meant that they should make the parts into convex collision shapes, not the entire volume they together comprise.
4:55 burning towards it to get there later (higher orbit, lower velocity) right?
also, i would like to know why the starship is shiny (polished surfaces emit the least blackbody radiation).
Yay another video, I look forward to your uploads, 🙂
Is no one else gonna mention that, "a bug in our on-call paging system prevented the Starlink operator from seeing the follow-on correspondence," is almost definitely just "we ignored followup correspondence and now want people to think it's not our fault"
Hmmm, playing chicken between an active satellite and a passive chunk of debris is like playing chicken with your car and a bridge abutment. So much easier to win (by losing propellant!).
Hi Scoot, I have a question for you. Do you know the name or where I can found information (research papers) on StarLink protocol ? I am very interesting to find more information abour end to end encryption. Thx :)
Perhaps we need to create a new role of Space Traffic Controller?
Imagine when they go on strike.
@@fransoto8343 lol. I guess they'd have a lot of negotiating power!
Hey, I've got a question:
5:17 - What happened in 2007 that caused the ammount of debris to literally almost double itself in what looks like probably a single event (and then again in 2009)? Some major collision I would guess...
ASAT demonstration by China and the US
Never though I'd see an international organization start passive-aggressively tweeting.
Kumquat Lord It is the European agency, wouldn't want to offend anyone with triggering speech.
It got SpaceX to respond when they weren't responding beforehand.
What do you think about maybe putting up an expandable sheet made out of the same material that bigelow uses in its space modules?
I know they would need to be massive but by having them expandable would mean they could launch larger payloads and maybe having multiples of them going around the earth which can help clean up LEO of the small debris that can cause the Kessler syndrome?
Would love to know your thoughts?
10.08 "the tiny satellite smashes with great aggression." Hahaha
Over 6 minutes in and I've only just now realized the monitor in the background is not a static image but KSP running with the UI hidden.
Unrelated comment: Just watched First Man....what a let down. If space travel was that depressing and completely devoid of excitement we would have never done it. And the shaky cam and super closeups were just horrible.
It had to be said. First Man was a turd. They got the gauges on the X-15 right, but totally screwed up the mood and motivations of Apollo. If you want to see a film get it right, see Apollo 11.
I'm really happy that at least you , Scott, are honest about the situation. There was a problem and even though nothing happened, there is a need for a better, centralized and automatized space traffic system. Because literally SpaceX stole life from this scientific satellite. And if you're a scientist and you have a project running on that piece of machinery, that's really sucks.
Sounds to me like maybe a little bit of public shaming on the part of ESA. A reminder that SpaceX needs to be a good space citizen and pay attention to their neighbors. I would hope that the automated avoidance systems would have some kind of human emergency contact in case the automated systems don't appear to be operating correctly.
Your head bump was probably a good reminder to always recheck one's trajectory...
Is this something we will need to worry about in KSP 2 multiplayer?
somebody has to play orbital traffic control, somebody with total ocd prefferably, looking at the vastness of space
What caused that spike in fragmentation debris in 2007?
Chinese anti-satellite missile test. Bastards.
If SpaceX cant control their 60 Satellits how do they want to do this with 10000?
Nobody claimed that SpaceX can't control their satellites.
It's more that larry over there went for coffee when the alert arrived.
Oh that larry, he's so amusing. The HILARITY.
Don't be a hater
Thank you Scott. You are a boon to humanity.
At this rate earth is gonna need a unified space traffic control agency sooner rather than later...
Need? Yes. Get one? No.
US Air Force 18 SPCS is the closest currently available, and it actually does a really good job of it because it already has all the infrastructure in place, thousands of radars all over the planet. Hundreds of nations contact them when they want to put a satellite up. Even Russia, and China, and North Korea. Now, whether or not they're honest about what the payload of those satellites are... that's a different story.
This is all normal.
Space X is a newcomer and is learning it's future job as a spacecraft operator.
They made a first test with a small batch of satellites to see how it all comes together. This test revealed that they have issues in their ticketing system and procedures since they failed to respond in time to ESA requests.
They got their slap on the wrist and they will have to work on resolving those issues before doing another test.
We shouldn't expect them to do everything right on the first try. But we should expect them to go in small steps, minimize the risks by staying away from manned spacecrafts and the more densely populated areas during their test runs, learn from those experiments, and adjust.
The ESA on the other side just did what they were supposed to do. When they identified a collision risk they first tried to contact the party responsible for the conflicting object to agree on a solution. They didn't receive a response in reasonable time so they took action. And since the direct communication channel doesn't work they declared their action on the widest broadcast channel available to maximize the chance the other party gets the message and doesn't initiate a conflicting avoidance maneuver on its own.
In a chicken game, both parties can lose by either nobody chickening out or both chickening out and colliding on conflicting escape paths. So the right thing to do when you chicken out is to shout out loudly and get the other one to stay on its track.
There should be a rule that the cheaper satellite is the one to move.
There is a strong incentive for the more expensive satellite to move, its called self-preservation...
@@gordonrichardson2972 But that's exactly why there should be a regulation on the contrary, as an avoidance maneuver spends fuel, and spending the fuel of a more expensive satellite is a bigger waste of money overall.
Rules should be more in-depht than this.
If one of the satellite is going to have to do an orbit-sustaining manoeuver, it makes more sense for it to do it.
And giving the priority to the satellite who was launched before would incentivate new launches to go in less crowded spaces.
Otherwise someone launching a very expensive one would just put it wherever he please, forcing all of the others to continuously avoid it, as long as it's the most expensive.
Aeolus was the name of my favorite cruiser class is Freespace2. :)
United Nations should create a space police with some satellites that go around with net guns and de-orbit people who violate regulations.
[this comment is about 70% a joke]
If these maneuvers are common place then a one in 10,000 chance is simply not good enough. If you have 10,000 such events per year, or 1000 per 10 years, you practically guarantee a collision or even regular collisions, and that not only looses two costly satellites, but also creates a very large amount of new space debris. But knowing human nature, we will have to wait for the first two or three collisions before an international organisation to coordinate actually gets set up.
1 in 10000 is what the probability is several days in advance. Generally that will either grow or become much less as they get closer as it becomes either the case of, clearly will miss, or, clearly will hit.
Well, after this, things will get even worse. Right?
It's only getting worse up there. There's no remediation until we start maintaining the field. It's like trash in the city, no contract workers to clean it, it's going to chug around. Space, is like our planet's India, but hey, one of their cities has started recycling in full earnest, so if they can pull that off, maybe we will have space janitors before the turn of the next century.
It was at this moment... ESA were the cammer leaning on the horn long after a driving fail resulted in a near miss that made its way onto UA-cam as if it were a dash cam compilation.
Legend has it... Their still leaning on the horn.
All that space and there is still traffic. Smfh. There needs to be a centralized organization for collision avoidance that equally distributes collision prevention maneuvers.
And by equally, you mean that weather satellites that provide life saving data to all of humanity should get out of the way for some privately owned communications satellite? Hell no.
All, open access, scientific data gathering satellites should have priority over privately owned satellites. This is not a game.
The importance of the betterment of humanity, far outweighs the quest for an individuals profit.
@@lhl2500 in any complex system, hierarchies are always established. I thought this would be assumed....
Not sure if this was implicit or if it's even an issue, but one challenge with Starlink avoidance is that the utility of the satellite is highly dependent on its position at a given time, relative to others in the constellation. An imaging satellite or other mission that was more or less independent might not "care" if they have to adjust timelines now and then.
If you have the Starlink system that can only work if the laser interlinks between neighboring satellites are operational, and one of those has to change the planned orbit to perform some avoidance maneuver, that might mean that the others in the same track or other tracks would have to adjust, as well? Would be interesting to model what kind of perturbations would cause changes to ripple through the entire constellation.
Well but ESA was right, this is an issue. You missed to point out the obvious.
Usually satellite providers coordinate their actions. Of course if it's just debris then you don't need to coordinate anything. But: SpaceX is able to maneuver their satellites but didn't anserwer. So how should ESA now what SpaceX is doing? If the starlink sat doesn't do anything: fine! But what if SpaceX had decided to also raise its orbit like ESA did? Both satellites doing the same maneuver could be the worst thing that happens. The same applies to aircrafts of course and there have been multiple accidents because of that. So TCAS (Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System) was introduced.
So ESA is right to point out the lack of communication. If SpaceX wants to have thousands of satellites in orbit then they must be able to react quickly. Not receiving emails (ESA didn't know there was a technocical problem, SpaceX just seemed to ignore ESA) is not an option. Also there needs to be a global solution. Without tweeting no one would know about this incident. So I think it was the right choice to bring attention to this issue.
Also I'd like to point out that Aeolus is way more important (and expensive) than a disfunctional starlink satellite that's already being deorbited. So wasting fuel of this scientific probe instead of a to-be-crashed-satellite is stupid and could've been avoided.
Actually ESA was in the wrong here. They shouldn't have called things out like this. SpaceX making an innocent mistake with a new system is what happened here. ESA was never in any danger as they always had control of their spacecraft.
I'd like to know why someone didn't pick up the phone.. It seems like a really EASY thing to do if you're not getting a reply through regular channels.
Ah yes, this seems like the right way to go. 'My satellite cost more, I shouldn't have to move it'.
No. Just no. If anything, you should be extra vigilant about manuevering for avoidance if your satellite cost tens of millions more. You have a LOT more to lose by failing to do so.
You're right in saying both parties need to communicate so they don't perform the SAME avoidance manuever. But no one has the 'right of way' in space. No one. Period. You could start launching satellite interceptors and blow any satellite that passes overhead out of the sky and there would be no laws broken. People would yell and scream and raise a big stink about it and there'd be a shit ton more debris in orbit for future satellites to deal with, but at the end of the day, no law was broken.
Currently, people don't do that because EVERYONE is reliant on having an safe, uncluttered sky to orbit their satellites in. Russia doesn't blow our satellites out of the sky because they know it would affect THEIR satellites. And vice versa. The world found out really quick what a bad idea that was when China took out their own satellite with a missile and blew huge amounts of debris into higher orbits. A few years later when the US tested their satellite kill vehicle, they flew ABOVE the target and hit it from overhead so that the debris would deorbit and not cause issues later down the road.
A 100 M cube is VERY little margin for error and is simply rolling the dice. To put that in perspective, commercial aircraft have far more accurate onboard navigation systems, especially for altimetry, and combine that with active collision avoidance systems. Yet the aircraft will be separated by 1000' (300m) vertically and up to 8 nm laterally
And that's why I'm against the starlink project.
It's a kessler effect waiting to happen.
Not necesarily. We need to learn how to control big constellations like this because they're coming no matter what. LEO is a really really big volume of space. If SpaceX isn't the first then it will be Blue Origin or someone else. They will learn the risks of deploying big constellations, come up with mitigations and then we'll all benefit. Starlink isn't just a money-making endeavour for SpaceX. Having low latency broadband that isn't dependent on infrastructure down on Earth will prove useful in natural disasters, survival scenarios and plenty of other situations I haven't even imagined. Like Scott mentioned, many of the potential collisions are with dead satellites with no means of moving. The active satellites are able to avoid collisions and when they are close to end of life, they will be de-orbited. The next step will be a means of automating this with communication between satellites so they do this on their own. Think of it like autonomous cars avoiding each other on the roads in the near future,
@@faceplants2
Well said!
@Andrew S
The problem is that this is one of the very few instances I'd say we need to advance other tech before taking a deep dive. (trust me I'm a transhumanist who'd openly advocated streemlining the R&D of cybernetics, sythetic organs, etc.)
We don't have a way to clear up space in the case of a kessler syndrome and it occuring may result in our species being grounded for centuries or even millennia.
I don't trust a private entity to unleash a megaconstellation of 10.000 sattelites when all it takes is one catastrophic failure, especially since it's almost guaranteed that such a mass produced sattelite may have a few cut corners or a design flaw that was rushed out or not tested int he case of a random variable. And regardless of how many apologies we get or how badly we may legally hit everyone involved with the screwup the problem would not be solved.
So, I am extremely against this. If anything I'd demand a ban on such constellations untill we had anti-kessler infrastructure in a higher orbit.
@@fl00fydragon
There is a commercial incentive not to endanger one's own satellite constellation. Which is why SpaceX are developing an automatic avoidance system, and why other companies are developing debris removal systems. Some regulation will be needed (right of way rules etc), but an outright ban would be counter productive and seriously hinder the growth of the aerospace industry.
@@fl00fydragon I totally get your concerns but I really don't see them banning large constellations like this. First of all there's no international body that could prevent other countries from putting up their own. This would only impact American companies causing us to fall behind in the next generation of satellites.
As far as them cutting corners: If they can manufacture an orbital rocket with a good enough safety record for humans to get on board I hope we can trust them to make satellites. The potential damage of a satellite collision is far higher than some cell phones batteries blowing up in people's pockets due to a manufacturing defect. they made plan on putting thousands of them up there but they're going up and batches of a few dozen which is a manageable number for a very thorough QA. A collision of a starlink satellite very likely poses the greatest risk to the rest of their own constellation so it's in their best interest to have a robust and redundant system of collision avoidance.
The risk of Kessler syndrome isn't going away no matter how careful we are. There's still the risk of some rogue nation taking out the wrong satellite causing a cascade of debris.
PS: By the sound of it I'm pretty confident you're already a fan of Isaac Arthur but if you somehow have not found him, his science and futurism content is fantastic.
EDIT: in response to your comment about rushing something or not thoroughly testing it: That's exactly what this first constellation of starlink satellites is. Just like new rocket engines blowing up on the test stand or vehicles failing during lunch abort tests, they're going to get them as close to perfect as possible before deploying them in huge numbers.
USSPACECOM was officially reinstated just a week before this happened. Good timing.
US Air Force uses email for the notification...
At least they aren't using fax instead.
@@celestinemachuca8930 Not bad, for a government agency. I work with Social Security, which is years ahead of its time. They were founded in 1935, and operate like it's 1945.
Email allows mass notification, has authentication mechanisms, retries sending over several days, and reports delayed and failed delivery. Sounds like a good system.
You gotta love the year 2006 jump in fragmentation debris on the graph at 5:18. I think I recall China intentionally blew a satellite up, as a weapons test. That's 20% of the entire object load.
Karl Davis Yes in 2007, but an accidental collision in 2009 added more debris.
"I found a bug where two satellites can automatically modify into a collision orbit pair. Can you up vote?" Kessler
Scott, stupid question... Do you have the sou dcloud link, or name of the new closing song that you've been using on videos? Its catchy!