> “They said at that point in time they had no plans,” says Merz. SpaceX confirmed that it exchanged the initial email with ESA. At that time, the probability of collision was about 1 in 50,000, according to SpaceX, which is too low to require any preventive action.
SpaceX might have even interpreted it as ESA asking because they might have their own plans for maneuvers and they just wanted to make sure that SpaceX's movements stayed predictable.
It doesn't need to be that SpaceX was being negligent here.
I hope their ubiquitous constellation of broadband-providing satellites works well. I couldn't care less about the negligible impact it might have on visual observations of the sky-- the society enriching effects of cheap ubiquitous networks outweigh it. But they have to get basic things like safety protocols right, not iterating without such things from a minimum viable product.
No, what I said about interpretation was about the first query when it was a 1 in 50,000 chance. For the message they missed, we don't need to imagine their interpretation because they can't interpret a message they never received.
> Even if we were going to that extent though, clearly such an interpretation doesn't comport itself to how these things are resolved within the community of satellite operators.
At the level of the community, I don't see a problem here. ESA tried to contact SpaceX to agree on a course of action; SpaceX couldn't be contacted because of a bug on their end, so ESA acted on its own to resolve the situation from its end.
I can see a problem if they plan to be a significant portion of all space traffic and they can never be relied on to be contactable in case of problems arising from their satellites. However, this happening once doesn't seem like negligence.
My criticism is with them having a system that wasn't tested adequately enough to realize they would be blind to further messages. This forced ESA to act on its own when standard protocol, the responsible way to behave, is to work together. The ESA's ability to act was a luxury not all satellites have. SpaceX's inadequate testing could have had catastrophic consequences for both parties. You seem to be using the fact that it all worked this time as evidence that there was no real problem here. But the fact that one responsible party avoided disaster doesn't excuse the irresponsible party's problem with inadequate testing. It would be a bit like having a car drive on the wrong side of the road, nearly hit another car, but that other car moved out of the way, so really everything is okay. That doesn't quite parse for me. I don't see how someone can come away from this without saying that SpaceX needs to fix something, because SpaceX themselves admit to that.
On the other hand, a culture of oversight that fails to adequately test its emergency response procedures seems a more systemic problem.