Re:SpaceX’s Starlink near-misses with other spacecraft are g...
by rocqua on Friday August 20, 2021 @03:31PM
(#28250380)
I imagine starlink has the advantage of being able to coordinate with 50% of satelites sharing their orbit (the starlink satelites) so they should have a lower 'incident per satellite' rate.
Re:SpaceX’s Starlink near-misses with other spacecraft are g...
by Jtsummers on Friday August 20, 2021 @03:32PM
(#28250393)
Per the article that 500/week is reduced to only the incidents with non-Starlink satellites. Assuming the article is presenting apples-to-apples, then the 80/week for OneWeb should correspond to that 500/week for Starlink.
Starlink's total with their own satellites as well was 1600.
It's also worth noting that Starlink/SpaceX does coordinate with other satellite operators, it's their responsibility to do so.
I was actually working on an edit when I saw your reply and decided to put it here instead.
EDIT:
Reread a section of the article:
> OneWeb, by comparison, currently has 250 satellites and passes another operators’ satellite 80 times per week.
So yes, I've made an apples-to-apples comparison here. We don't know OneWeb's total incident count from this article alone and I'm insufficiently motivated to track down that statistic.
As someone else pointed out, Starlink's presence in LEO has more than doubled the number of satellites so it kind of makes sense that there'd be a corresponding increase in the number of incidents, and just by the odds that Starlink would be involved in around half of them. The other claim in the article, that when Starlink's ~12k satellites are in orbit they'll be involved in 90% of these incidents also make sense. They'd make up about 90% of satellites in LEO using the present numbers.
If half the cars on the road are Fords and half the accidents reported involve Fords that doesn't mean Ford cars or drivers are somehow worse than the rest, it actually means they're average. It'd be more interesting if the number of incidents leaned toward Starlink for something other than just conventional probability calculations, that is they accounted for a larger-than-expected share of incidents.
Two stats provided, for Starlink and OneWeb. Starlink has 1700 satellites and 500 incidents/week. OneWeb has 250 satellites and 80 incidents/week. Starlink has 6.8x as many satellites. Again, by the numbers with what's reported here Starlink is no worse than other actors in this space. OneWeb has about a 32% incident rate (incidents/satellites) while Starlink has 29%. By these numbers they're actually slightly better than OneWeb here.