StarLink Internet is accused of crowding out competitors in space Musk denies

Elon Musk has denied criticism that its Starlink satellite internet occupies too much space. He argues that in orbit close to Earth, there may be space for "tens of billions of satellites."

Musk said: "Space is very large, and satellites are very small. In this case, we will not effectively block others in any way. We're not stopping anyone from doing anything, and we're not going to do it either. ”

Earlier, European Space Agency Director Joseph Aschbach said Musk was "setting the rules" for the new commercial space economy. Musk's rush to launch thousands of communications satellites, he warned, would make fewer radio frequencies and orbital slots available to everyone else.

Musk's private space company, SpaceX, has launched nearly 2,000 satellites for its Starlink broadband communications network and plans to launch tens of thousands more.

Musk dismissed the claim that he was "crowding out" future satellite internet rivals, comparing the number of satellites in near-Earth orbit to what he called the number of 2 billion cars and trucks on Earth. He said that each orbiting "shell" around Earth is larger than the surface of the planet, and every 10 meters or so there is an additional shell into space.

He said: "This means that there is space for tens of billions of satellites, and thousands of satellites are nothing." It's like adding thousands of cars on the planet, which is nothing at all. ”

Many experts have questioned Musk's claim that satellites in low Earth orbit can safely match the density of cars and trucks on Earth.

Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said satellites flying at 17,000 miles per hour at 17,000 miles per hour would need much larger intervals than a car to allow time to adjust their orbits in the event of a possible collision. At this rate, he calculated that the three-second gap in each orbiting shell could only hold about 1,000 satellites.

Because calculating the trajectories of many different moons is difficult, and changes in solar weather affect their trajectories, potential collisions can only be identified near the time when they might occur. "For many space users, planned avoidance operations take at least a few hours, if not days, so it shows that space is already too crowded," he said. ”

Laura Forczyk, a space analyst at space consulting group Astralytical, said Musk's comparison of satellites to vehicles on Earth was "flippant," but added: "He thinks it's a traffic management issue and that's basically right." ”

She said the race to launch new communications networks with thousands of satellites showed that there was a clear need for more coordination among countries to determine "how orbital space will be allocated and how space traffic will be managed."