A collision in space was narrowly avoided last week when a newly deployed Chinese satellite came within a few hundred meters of one of the roughly 9,000 Starlink satellites currently operating in low Earth orbit. SpaceX is laying the blame on the satellite operator for not sharing location data.
“When satellite operators do not share ephemeris for their satellites, dangerously close approaches can occur in space,” wrote Michael Nicolls, VP of Starlink Engineering. “A few days ago, 9 satellites were deployed from a launch from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Northwestern China. As far as we know, no coordination or deconfliction with existing satellites operating in space was performed, resulting in a 200 meter clo…
A collision in space was narrowly avoided last week when a newly deployed Chinese satellite came within a few hundred meters of one of the roughly 9,000 Starlink satellites currently operating in low Earth orbit. SpaceX is laying the blame on the satellite operator for not sharing location data.
“When satellite operators do not share ephemeris for their satellites, dangerously close approaches can occur in space,” wrote Michael Nicolls, VP of Starlink Engineering. “A few days ago, 9 satellites were deployed from a launch from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Northwestern China. As far as we know, no coordination or deconfliction with existing satellites operating in space was performed, resulting in a 200 meter close approach between one of the deployed satellites and STARLINK-6079 (56120) at 560 km altitude.”
Starlink satellites have the ability to automatically adjust course to avoid objects in their path. However, those objects have to be known for the avoidance system to work. In the first six months of 2025, Starlink spacecraft performed over 144,000 such maneuvers.
The offending satellite was launched by CAS Space, which responded to Nicolls on X.
“Our team is currently in contact for more details. All CAS Space launches select their launch windows using the ground-based space awareness system to avoid collisions with known satellites/debris. This is a mandatory procedure.”
The commercial space launch company, based in Guangzhou, China, then seemed to distance itself from blame, by saying the incident “occurred nearly 48 hours after payload separation, by which time the launch mission had long concluded.”
Over 24,000 objects, including satellites and debris, are currently being tracked in low Earth orbit, an increase of 76 precent since 2019, according to the publication Space. And by the end of this decade, there could be as many as 70,000 satellites operating in that same region, mostly in the service of space internet constellations being launched by private and government organizations in the US, China, and Europe.
News of the near-miss will only increase worry over so many spacecraft operating in the same region. As the theory goes, any collision could trigger a Kessler syndrome scenario, whereby a cascading series of collisions would wipe out existing satellites and make the entirety of low Earth orbit unusable.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
- Thomas Ricker