HN Reader

China applies to put 200K satellites in space after calling Starlink crash risk

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For the predictable reasons, the article overemphasizes "number of satellites" and under-emphasizes "height of satellites" and "inclination of satellites."

The CTC-1 constellation proposes to be at 510 km altitude and 97.4 degrees inclination[0], which is already a heavily-populated orbit[1] due to being in a Sun-synchronous orbit. Since the collision risk scales as the object density squared, this is an especially foolhardy decision from the perspective of space debris and space sustainability.

Remember that most of the satellite collisions occur in a "halo" around the North and South poles where the SSO orbits all pile up. Avoiding these orbital slots (and in fact, removing defunct objects from these valuable orbits) is the best thing we could do for Kessler syndrome. China is doing literally the exact opposite.

It also doesn't help that China just abandons their upper stages in orbit, rather than doing proper deorbit burns.[2] Since each Chinese rocket also can only launch a handful of satellites (vs almost 50 per SpaceX launch), the number of abandoned debris upper stages is truly massive, and again they're all being carelessly discarded in pretty much the worst possible orbit.

[0] https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?action=dlattach;...

[1] https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=44021.0

[2] https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/10/everyone-but-china-has...

3 days agoby schiffern

Already it’s getting hard to avoid noticing satellite trains when stargazing with the naked eye. If mega-constellations really scale into the hundreds of thousands, it feels like we’re on track to permanently degrade the night sky, even in places without much light pollution.

With mega-constellation launches accelerating, the sci‑fi premise of imprisoning ourselves behind a debris field feels less fictional. This is essentially the collision-cascade risk described by Kessler Syndrome

Kurzgesagt has a good explainer. Hopefully we never trigger it.

https://youtu.be/yS1ibDImAYU?si=vbs-PY5VEA9xv_gS

3 days agoby bicepjai

Starlink was sold to investors as being politically neutral and almost immediately became a US military asset. It was just a matter of time before China wanted their own version. No doubt some other countries will want their own systems free of American or Chinese control, though obviously it's going to be more difficult for them to do something as complete. It's going to be an interesting choice for ESA/the EU to decide if they want their own thing too instead of relying on the US to be a fair broker of access.

And of those countries who would like to have a system free of influence from other countries, well, if they can't afford to build one out, they might be able to orbit a bunch of chaff to even the playing field again.

3 days agoby Mountain_Skies

I wasn't aware how far along some of these Chinese satellite networks were. There are several, and the number of satellites planned for them is astonishing. This article seems like a good intro to them, with comparisons to Starlink: https://archive.is/zPsmq

3 days agoby nkurz

>Under ITU rules established in 2019, satellite systems have to be operating – or have at least one satellite launched and operated for a period of time – within seven years of initial filing, after which they have to deploy 10 per cent of their constellations within two years, half within five years and all within seven years.

1. regulatory squatting on good mega constellation orbits.

2. if i'm reading this right PRC needs to hit 9k in 9 years, 100k in 14 years. Seems doable on PRC speed. If it's half, i.e. 100k with 5 years of filing, then no way target will be hit.

3 days agoby maxglute

Filing an ITU submission is one thing, now they need to make reliable, reusable heavy-lift spacecraft. Probably 5-10 years out tbh. They're just squatting on approvals.

3 days agoby with

The current star link system only provides access to 9 million people.

Sure this is important but what is more important is 8 billion people having and keeping their access to space.

2 days agoby glemion43

And that is a good thing, because china will reign in its junior partner who threatened to blow starlink up to get access to it in the ukrainewar.

3 days agoby 21asdffdsa12

FYI, Seven years ago, China discussed banning killer robots at the United Nations, but the effort failed. The rest of the story is as you can see.

- https://press.un.org/en/2019/gadis3635.doc.htm

- https://web.archive.org/web/20201028152258/https://www.stopk...

3 days agoby litbear2022

Even if we did get to use them, China will listen in on all traffic.

2 days agoby classified