SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft exploded on Thursday minutes after lifting off from Texas, dooming an attempt to deploy mock satellites in the second consecutive failure this year for Elon Musk’s Mars rocket program.
Several videos on social media showed fiery debris streaking through the dusk skies near south Florida and the Bahamas after Starship’s breakup in space, which occurred shortly after it began to spin uncontrollably with its engines cut off, a SpaceX livestream of the mission showed.
The failure comes just more than a month after the company’s seventh Starship flight also ended in an explosive failure. The back-to-back mishaps occurred in early mission phases that SpaceX has easily surpassed previously, indicating serious setbacks for a program Musk has sought to speed up this year.
That image is so incredibly silly.
First, there are fewer than 20k starlink satellites, each about 3m long. If you put 20k 3m objects on the surface of the planet would you think that they were taking up all the room? Of course not. And the amount of free space available in LEO is even greater than at the surface.
Second, if they had made the “satellites” on that image to scale, you wouldn’t be able to see them at all. The approximate surface area of LEO where the satellites are is like 8x10^8 km^2. They aren’t running out of space.
tl;dr: the satellites aren’t “running out of room”