alt Hacker NewsLEO is not the place to worry about Kessler syndrome.
Mostly, Kessler syndrome isn’t something to worry about at all; there are just a lot of orbital planes available. But in LEO, the mechanics don’t even apply.
LEO is not the place to worry about Kessler syndrome.
Mostly, Kessler syndrome isn’t something to worry about at all; there are just a lot of orbital planes available. But in LEO, the mechanics don’t even apply.
Not to be alarmist, but suppose a galactic federation judges that humans in their current state of development will pose a danger to other civilizations when they imminently attain warp capability, so as a safety precaution they need to be confined to their planet for at least a millennium. An agent of the federation posing as human manipulates the population into allowing 100,000 satellites to be deployed. With that done, federation scientists solve the many-body problem for the exact necessary speed and trajectory of a small meteor to shatter one of the satellites such that some of its fragments precisely target its neighboring satellites, and so on, while the rest get kicked up into higher orbits. Life goes on but any enterprise that depends on penetrating the debris field becomes infeasible.