HIGH SPEED CRASH

I’ve seen my fair share of car wrecks. They tend to be on highways, interstates, and turnpikes. I have rarely seen any on country roads. It’s common sense that the more cars that are close to each other, the higher the chances of a crash. All it takes is one person’s blind spot meeting another person’s distraction. The average reaction time is 0.7 seconds, so when driving at high speeds and surrounded by other vehicles, that doesn’t leave us much time to avoid disaster.

Those scenarios play out every day, and they’re made worse by reaction time, crowded trips, and limited space to maneuver. Did you know there’s a similar setup right above our heads? And we are not talking about planes. Not helicopters. Not hot air balloons. Satellites.

When you look up in the sky, you see a lot of empty space, and maybe a few clouds that look like turtles. It’s hard to think that the sky could be crowded when it’s mostly blue. Low-earth satellites zoom by at around 17,500 miles per hour and complete an orbit around 90 minutes. These fast speeds limit the reaction time to avoid a crash, and while it doesn’t look like it, there are thousands of satellites zipping by from one minute to the next. It’s not just satellites, but also space junk, that occupy that area. One study has the count up to 25,000 objects. Meanwhile, the total number of satellites is about 11,000. That’s up from 3,000 just six years ago. According to Goldman Sachs, we are on pace to add 70,000 more low-orbit satellites in the next five years. Definitely crowded.

You might be thinking–those are machines up there, so the chance they’ll crash is pretty low. That’s what I thought too, until I thought about the number of times my computer freezes or the number of times major solar flares occur (ten on average). NASA has this to say on solar flares: “A solar flare is an intense burst of radiation, or light, on the Sun. These flashes span the electromagnetic spectrum — including X-rays, gamma rays, radio waves, and ultraviolet and visible light. Solar flares are the most powerful explosions in the solar system — the biggest ones can have as much energy as a billion hydrogen bombs.” These explosions can affect radios and satellites.

What’s the big deal if a satellite crashes? There are thousands of low orbit ones anyway. Well, just like with a car crash, the debris would spread. Unlike a car crash, that debris would travel at 17,500 miles an hour, which could endanger more and more satellites.

Scientists put together an awareness tool called CRASH that gauges how long it would take for a satellite to crash if all maneuverability shut off, such as when a major solar flare strikes. CRASH estimates that it would take 5.5 days for there to be a satellite crash in that scenario.

What does it mean if a crash causes more debris in low orbit? Well, it can impact what we send into higher orbit. At this elevation we have satellites that provide communication, navigation, and weather monitoring. That doesn’t even mention the equipment we send out for space exploration and scientific research.

If you’ve seen the movie Gravity with Sandra Bullock, you have seen an exaggerated phenomenon play out. The Kessler Syndrome describes a scenario where orbiting debris can collide, which creates more debris that can create more collisions. The movie dramatizes the danger while highlighting the concern of debris in a crowded area. In the article “Understanding the Misunderstood Kessler Syndrome,” the author makes the case that all of this debris will eventually cost money as we need to remove it, but that’s an engineering problem that hasn’t been worked out or funded. In the meantime our data and communication are one major solar flare or one computer miscalculation from crashing.

Once you connect all of this together, you can see we have too many low-orbit satellites, and when we launch more, we are increasing the chances of collisions that create debris. I’m grateful that at Kanokla we bury fiber safely in the ground. It is further protected from the elements with conduit, and while fiber is lightning fast, it is not spinning at 17,500 per hour.