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Comment by stupidcar | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk trying to save humanity from going extinct as a "one planet species" and in the process causing us to miss a near-Earth asteroid whose impact wipes us out would be rather ironic.

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The ironic thing would be if we detected a large asteroid and had no way of deflecting it in time because we had shutdown SpaceX in an attempt to better find smaller asteroids.

Or we can't launch anything to save us because of Kessler event caused by startlink sometime back.

The Kessler Syndrome doesn’t apply at Starlink’s altitude.

My knowledge basically ends at knowing of the concept, so can you elaborate how/why it is different in different orbits?

The lower the orbit, the more quickly objects de-orbit. This is especially true of the lowest LEO orbits that Starlink sits in, where atmospheric drag also enters the picture. Worst case scenario, a totally dead satellite will deorbit on its own in a couple of years and they can very easily suicide if required to avoid catastrophe.

collisions can easily push things into higher orbits.

I'm not a rocket scientist, but this seems unlikely; sure two large satellites colliding could create smaller debris with a much higher apogee, but it seems to me that the perigee would not increase, so it would still spend a significant fraction of its orbit in atmospheric drag.

but could easily collide with something at apogee, especially if the collision lead to a cascading style kessler syndrome event.

Kessler syndrome will never prevent us from launching things, it could theoretically stop us from parking things in certain orbits, but the risk to launch through those orbits will be minimal.

Source (wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome#Implications

Starlink can't cause a Kessler event. It's orbit is too low.

LOL. Unfortunately, we still are not in any position to do anything about any detected asteroid.

Of course we are, if we would spend the money.

Humans had no NEO monitoring for about 500k years, we'll do ok for a few years of diminished capacity

Dinosaurs didn’t have one either and are still doing… ooh

Sadly that is what happens when you blindly follow someone without ever questioning their doctrine.

We've already detected all asteroids with that mass in our solar system [1]. There are smaller ones that won't end life on Earth that are still concerning, but the quandary is we have almost nothing to do even if we detected a threat from an asteroid.

[1] https://youtu.be/4Wrc4fHSCpw

If only someone was trying to build a spaceship company that could launch massive payloads everyday.

Only in the near planetary region of the solar system. There's lots of comets with very long periods we didn't detect yet, because their last visit to the inner solar system was centuries or even millennia ago.

> We've already detected all asteroids with that mass in our solar system.

We really haven't. We found Sedna in 2003. Makemake and Eris in 2005.

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