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Comment by bongodongobob | Hacker News Reader

Assuming a 10m wide satellite, that's like grains of sand in a 470 foot orbit. I'm not going to calculate the odds right now but the chances of collision (assuming they're even capable of colliding in their orbits) has to be infinitesimally small. Your assertion that "accidents always happen" is doing all the legwork for your argument and it's so unlikely it may as well be false.

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No need to calculate odds, we have data. There have been hundreds of collision and explosion events creating debris in orbit. Many if not most of them have been unintentional accidents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_debris_producing...

In that list there's 1 intentional collision and 1 accidental.

It's far from a comprehensive list. Many of the causes are listed as "unknown" as well. This page lists 9 unintentional collision events: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_collision and it's clearly not comprehensive either since it doesn't contain some from the other list. And collisions are not the only kind of accident creating debris clouds. The page cites 250 debris creation events as of 2015, there have been more since, and most of them were not intentional. Ultimately it doesn't matter what specific kind of unintentional accident created debris. All that matters is how long it will pollute orbit.

Those are events that created debris, not events caused by debris.

That's right, illustrating my point that accidents creating debris are common and not realistically completely avoidable. Which is why we need to avoid putting satellites in orbits where any created debris will inevitably pollute space for millennia.

Frustrating that the charts do not show the elevation. I bet they are all LEO.

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