Here is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLjW6zuYmos
I encourage you to reflect on this bias. I suspect you're taking the American state as a template, and extrapolating its incompetence. The history is filled with different ideas - some of them far older than America itself.
Hell, I'd call America a place so naturally rich, it's practically the case study how much dysfunction can be papered over with money instead of statecraft.
I’m interested in understanding your comparison here and how it would be applicable to space and how you envision it working based on your comparison.
It's a new SaaS play - Satellites As A Service. That is, your satellite gets to stay in orbit as long as you pay me.
Otherwise my satellite killer eats them.
-- Ernst Blofeld
The ITU has no enforcement power, but fundamentally that doesn't really matter much, since enforcement is handled by the member states. Are there attempts by various member states to skirt around the rules or favour their own national interests? Of course, and sometimes these are successful - but nobody just outright ignores the rules, because they know it very quickly leads to a tragedy of the commons.
Administering an orbital LVT is exactly the kind of thing that could slot cleanly into an expanded ITU mandate. Where the money goes would be up for debate, but I think the cleanest solution would be ITU rebates most of it back to the government of the country that applied for the orbital slot provided that they demonstrate it's going into a space sustainability fund.
Is it perfect? No, but it's based on a rickety-but-mostly-works international model and it doesn't require global government conspiracy theories to come to fruition.
Can't necessarily stop a multinational firing things to space on Russian/Chinese/ESA launch vehicles
It's like this bicycle meme where the person puts a stick in its wheels.
It's for the same reason that petrol cars are encouraged in the US.
Punishing SpaceX will lead to a bigger financial crisis, an upset Elon Musk who might refuse to fund the next democratic election and dozens of thousands of lost jobs (fortunately they already became millionaire, riding the right rocket) for a problem that most of the rich population doesn't care about.
Because in the city, it's about your petrol car, big trucks, and nobody to see the stars and a bit more pollution doesn't change much at that scale from their eyes.
CFCs (these gazes destroying ozone) were a notable exception, because it would lead to death of everyone (the same way that petrol with lead), except death, universally there was no advantage to defend.
But a space filled with US satellites is a great advantage for the US, since they are the only ones with the capabilities to deploy thousands of them, and it's a big business for military intelligence.
I can imagine the main reason they are going to regulate, is so that older satellite debris don't destroy the new shiny satellites, but beauty of the sky is going to be the very least important factor.
Like when Amazon finally had warehouses in all fifty states and suddenly quit campaigning against online sales tax.
Which is utter bullshit. Quite painful to hear too. LEO is not your average american homeless stolen mart cart. Can we please rise to some more insighful level of discourse?
Collision risk is significantly reduced by having maneuverable spacecraft with good conjunction prediction systems in place. But fundamentally, nothing is perfect and accidents can and do happen - you set a maneuver threshold based on an expected collision probability, but it's an engineering tradeoff: "spend the fuel to maneuver out of the way of everything, no matter how remote, or accept a small collision risk?"
And of course, when you are launching thousands of satellites, you will have a few failures that will become unmaneuverable hazards. Just the way it goes, you can't realistically engineer your way to perfect reliability.
So sorry, I have to reject your claims that it's "utter bullshit." Space debris risk is a well studied field, so much so that satellite insurance companies are starting to fold those calculations into insurance premiums. So yeah, it's real, and it deserves more than a pithy dismissal.
Not saying it couldn’t be bad if there were such a collision as obvi a really bad collision could in the short term damage Starlink and anyone else who decides to use that orbit, but this isn’t existential risk territory anymore.
[1] I’m not really mourning the loss of Napster, but rather rolling my eyes at the way YouTube has made having more than 6 seconds of any song a death sentence for the video, killing fair use dead, since demonetization directly halts distribution of a video.
Space flight is a typical "tragedy of the commons" scenario. Like radio waves (especially on HF), space orbits are a finite resource... and not just problematic for other satellites, because ground-based space observation gets more and more impeded by satellites.
(This is already happening, today, for other bits of their misbehavior!)
How about No?
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
Of course it's still 3 orders of magnitude slower than galaxy collisions, which themselves are colliding at roughly 1% of the speed of light.
I hate this cynicism in everything. People didnt work there 10 years ago to be millionaires in a far away IPO, they worked there because they are Team Space.
Sure, some of the employees are team space. The money is funding a transition to autocracy though, so. I remain skeptical of their motives.
Nowadays it is generally frowned upon if you leave upper stages in orbit or if your satellite fragment spontaneously. There are of course exceptions (like some chinese launches leaving massive core stages in orbit that ten randomly fall back a couple months later) but AFAIK the situations seems to be actually improving due to the added robustness, that was only made possible by cheaper access to space.
One of those ships crashes and the boys from the Dwarf find the service mechanoid, which is how they get Kryten.
It's a tragedy of the commons situation. And given how well we are able to regulate those kind of situations globally, I'm rooting for the ring.
There is a huge amount of "space" available even in low orbital shells. Which also naturally decay.
The number of satellites required to create a measurable number of particles in the planet's atmosphere would be impossibly large. How much mass to orbit do you think is required to create a 1 PPM increase in earth's atmosphere of these "micro particles"?
I find it extremely disheartening how much anti-technology, anti-science, and anti-progress sentiment I read about lately.