zlacker

Now I would really love to know who the other operator was.

>>Coeur+(OP)
And what the goal of that maneuver was.

>>Coeur+(OP)
> In a statement posted on social media late Dec. 12, Michael Nicolls, vice president of Starlink engineering at SpaceX, said a satellite launched on a Kinetica-1 rocket from China two days earlier passed within 200 meters of a Starlink satellite.

> CAS Space, the Chinese company that operates the Kinetica-1 rocket, said in a response that it was looking into the incident and that its missions “select their launch windows using the ground-based space awareness system to avoid collisions with known satellites/debris.” The company later said the close approach occurred nearly 48 hours after payload separation, long after its responsibilities for the launch had ended.

> The satellite from the Chinese launch has yet to be identified and is listed only as “Object J” with the NORAD identification number 67001 in the Space-Track database. The launch included six satellites for Chinese companies and organizations, as well as science and educational satellites from Egypt, Nepal and the United Arab Emirates.

>>Nitpic+J7
> 48 hours after payload separation, long after its responsibilities for the launch had ended

This is funny, the way things are just discarded in space, not our problem anymore vs. deorbit

>>jacque+M
Cause problems and deny it

>>ge96+Mk
I think they are saying "this is not on us, this is on the sat operator". Which may or may not be true, who knows.

>>ge96+Mk
I think this is more that the offending satellite was at that point the responsibility of the satellite operator, not the launch operator.

>>jacque+M
It seems like it deliberately came close to the Starlink sat, but the "why" is still a good question.

>>phkahl+bt
A test of SpaceX's awareness & response would be ample reason.

>>ge96+Mk
If you get hit by a car 5 minutes after you get let off at a bus stop it isn't the bus drivers fault.

>>Increa+HI
Nah, in this case the driver is the person who gets off and goes and bumps into another person.

>>Increa+HI
Yeah while I didn't directly mention it, I'm referring to stages being discarded in space by a specific party

>>phkahl+bt
Weapons test springs to mind, or as a sibling comment suggested a test of Starlink response capabilities.

How confident are we the intent was nefarious? Do you ever see accidental near-misses with this type of flight profile?

>>bell-c+6v
If so, SpaceX's longer term response being "here's our SSA data for everyone and here's how we source it" is a good one for all parties involved (even more so for SpaceX and govt customers they share it with if they have other capabilities...)

>>notaha+3W
Speculation:

SpaceX has considerably better data than what they disclose, and offer free of charge.

The USSF enjoys full access to that better data, for $[TOP_SECRET]/month.

>>Nitpic+Jq
unless the sat operator is sueing for a refund because they were put in the wrong orbit... its the sat operator.

>>rkager+hT
The system exists- ergo, people in the know are concerned about accidental collisions.

>>bell-c+al1
Well we already know Starshield (the military version) has specialist space domain awareness capabilities that aren't being shared, and it's entirely plausible that data from regular Starlink sensors/receivers (other than the disclosed star trackers) can be fused into something useful by SpaceX and/or the Space Force.

>>butvac+6q1
Alternative: the system exists, so people in the know may well have done proper risk assessment and may have identified multiple reasons that could result in a collision. Some of those reasons are accidental, some are not.