Kessler Syndrome

The price might need to be flat for each satellite (depending on the orbit) + a price per kg as cubesats are becoming more and more prevalent.

It won't cost the same to fetch something in low earth orbit than in geosynchronous orbit.

Not much need to worry about GEO. Everything there is moving at the same speed in the same direction. It's all the stuff in upper LEO where different satellites are all orbiting at different inclinations where this is a problem. And only upper LEO, down where the ISS is at ~400km an object with a low ballistic coefficient like a screw won't stay in orbit very long.

The weird thing about Kessler syndrome is that people use it as an argument not to launch sattelites.

So it’s kind of like we’re getting the effects of Kessler syndrome by trying to prevent it.

If a satellite is in a very low orbit then any debris fall to earth quickly. Almost all cubesats have a orbital life of six to five years. The space station, in a normal low earth orbit, would hit the earth in around three years without reboosts.

The higher you go, the more absolute volume there is, the slower the satellites there travel and the fewer satellites there are.

So that leaves a band of mid-upper LEO satellites to consider for Kessler Syndrome.

When you have a collision between satellites, the velocity on average of each fragment is less than it was before, making the fragments decay faster. The fragments after each collision are smaller than they were before as well, thus having more air and solar resistance, which also makes them decay faster.

The Chinese FY-1C satellite that was blown up was the absolute worst case for a satellite explosion. It was located on the high side of LEO with a decay time measured in human generations, and it was in a super crowded sun-following orbit altitude, sharing space with lots of weather and earth observation satellites. The explosion generated 150,000 debris fragments.

In the ten years since, most of those fragments have reentered. We now have 2,000 golfball sized or bigger fragments being tracked, and over the past ten years, the only casualty has been a small, ten pound reflector satellite. Small debris pieces fall, and big pieces can be tracked and avoided.

If every satellite we have put into space magically exploded, and the debris was magically moved to a high LEO altitude and evenly distributed to avoid any holes, then we could still launch through this orbit of death to higher altitudes with only a 1 in 1000 probability of impact.

Space regulation has gotten much tougher since the bad old days. Satellites are now required to have deorbit or safeing plans, and the median satellites size has gone down by a couple orders of magnitude.

Kessler syndrome isn't something that keeps me up at night.

The USA did the same in 1985 [1] and 2008 [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solwind

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Burnt_Frost