Science Alert By Andy Tomaswick, Universe Today 12/17/2025
A "house of cards" is such a wonderful English phrase, one now primarily associated with a Netflix political drama. However, its original meaning refers to a fundamentally unstable system.
It's also the term Sarah Thiele, originally a PhD 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 pre-print on arXiv.
They have plenty of justification for using that term. Calculations show that, across all Low-Earth Orbit mega-constellations, a close approach – defined as two satellites coming within 1 kilometer of each other – occurs every 22 seconds. For Starlink alone, that number is once every 11 minutes.
Another known metric of Starlink is that, on average, each of the thousands of satellites has to perform 41 maneuvers per year to avoid running into other objects in their orbit.
That might sound like an efficiently engineered system operating the way it should, but as any engineer will tell you, edge cases – the things that don't 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.
More:
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-single-solar-storm-could-trigger-an-end-to-space-travel-heres-how
