I would argue that 8% is absolutely negligible; however one thing that isn't is that airspace is a narrow band vertically (12 km? Not sure exactly), while LEO is about 800 km thick (from about 200 km, because the Kármán line isn't good enough, to about 1000 km).
replyConversely:
> Daily flights 50k-100k. Total number of satellites <20k.
Those 20k satellites orbit roughly every 95 minutes, so they're doing ~15 orbits per day, and even the longest flights from conventional aircraft are about half that distance, so by distance each satellite in LEO is doing strictly more than the equivalent of 30 flights per day each.
Research I'm doing for a blog post has shown me that the exact position of a satellite is surprisingly variable compared to what you'd reasonably expect from a "Newtonian spherical Earth with a perfect vacuum" approximation of the orbits, enough so that it makes sense to treat 1 km as the "collision avoidance manoeuvres needed" threshold.
Airplanes are much more likely to collide, but they don't dump hyperspeed shrapnel into the airspace that persists for months or years when they do. It makes sense to be extremely paranoid about satellite collisions.
replyI believe the second half of your comment is exactly what I was getting at.
replyYes, I agree! But a 10% increase in surface area of LEO isn't small when compared to the size of the satellite, taking into account how the surface area at 10km compares to airplanes.
reply10% is an outrageously large change in a normal loan interest rate and an irrelevant change when comparing the weight of a paper plane to a real one. Keeping in mind another factor in your comparison was 7700%, I'm inclined to agree the 10% is negligible in context. It's fun to think about though.
replyBut 10% is 50 million square kilometers. If we project this surface area to a theoretical planet with a diameter of 2000kms this planet alone would support 2000+ Starlink satellites in LEO. This is again not negligible.
replyThere are all sorts of such scenarios beyond the one being discussed where it's a relevant amount. This is true of most any measure or metric and why the context that we're talking about the skies of Earth compared to the LEO of Earth is key. Once you remove that context and start comparing against other things you can any difference insignificant or critically massive by choice.
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