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Comment by gitfan86 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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