There wasn't any close miss. The "close miss" was a press blast operation by a competitor. The two companies were in coordination and because the competitor couldn't trust SpaceX to avoid their satellite spacex disabled their avoidance intentionally so that the competitor could move their satellite. Then said competitor went on a crazy press tirade about "dangerous starlink" even though SpaceX helped them out. If SpaceX had done nothing Starlink would have successfully avoided the competitor's satellite.

I've heard OneWeb's constellation ops team (the engineers in charge of coordinating maneuvers with other spacecraft for collision avoidance) threatened to walk out over the crazy press tirade. The craziness was from someone at the top, not from the folks on the ground.

That's really interesting, where did you read that?

The near miss turned out to be a total fake I think.

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Space...

>>like half of all active satellites in LEO? It's not surprising that they would be half the encounters.

Half of all sats, not objects. These close encounters are not just with other satellites but any other tracked objects in the database, of which there are many more.

Wouldn't that still be expected if they make up half the satellites? Or do these numbers also include near-misses of two non-satellite objects, in which case Starlink would do worse than non-steered space junk?

Yup. Starlink has launched 1740 satellites, and before starlink there were only about 1500 active satellites in LEO total.

In other news, 50% of the population represents half of all people

Hehe, reminds me of this xkcd/2476 [1]

[1] https://xkcd.com/2476/