{"id":227194,"date":"2025-12-16T01:44:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T07:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/12\/2-8-days-to-disaster-why-we-are-running-out-of-time-in-low-earth-orbit"},"modified":"2025-12-16T01:44:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T07:44:09","slug":"2-8-days-to-disaster-why-we-are-running-out-of-time-in-low-earth-orbit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/12\/2-8-days-to-disaster-why-we-are-running-out-of-time-in-low-earth-orbit","title":{"rendered":"2.8 days to disaster: Why we are running out of time in low earth orbit"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/D9Jf41w1ChI?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>A \u201cHouse of Cards\u201d is a wonderful English phrase that it seems is now primarily associated with a Netflix political drama. However, its original meaning is of a system that is fundamentally unstable. It\u2019s also the term Sarah Thiele, originally a Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia, and now at Princeton, and her co-authors used to describe our current satellite mega-constellation system in a new paper available in <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2512.09643\" target=\"_blank\">pre-print on <i>arXiv<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>They have plenty of justification for using that term. Calculations show that, across all low-Earth orbit mega-constellations, a \u201cclose approach,\u201d defined as two satellites passing by each at less than 1km separation, occurs every 22 seconds. For Starlink alone, that number is once every 11 minutes. Another known metric of <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2022-07-esa-swarm-dodges-collision-climb.html?utm_source=embeddings&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=internal\" rel=\"related\">Starlink<\/a> is that, on average, each of the thousands of satellites have to perform 41 maneuvers per year to avoid running into other objects in their orbit.<\/p>\n<p>That might sound like an efficiently engineered system operating the way it should, but as any engineer will tell you, \u201cedge cases\u201d\u2014the things that don\u2019t happen in a typical environment, are the cause of most system failures. According to the paper, solar storms are one potential edge case for satellite mega-constellations. Typically, solar storms affect satellite operation in two ways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A \u201cHouse of Cards\u201d is a wonderful English phrase that it seems is now primarily associated with a Netflix political drama. However, its original meaning is of a system that is fundamentally unstable. It\u2019s also the term Sarah Thiele, originally a Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia, and now at Princeton, and her [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[418,2028],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-227194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","category-satellites"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227194\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}