How do satellites get put into orbit? They must be organized in some way so they don’t crash into eachother.

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How do satellites get put into orbit? They must be organized in some way so they don’t crash into eachother.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Yes, there is quite a bit of organization that has to be done to ensure nobody crashes into anything else up there, and it’s one of the things that NASA and the US Space Command take very seriously. The chances of two satellites smacking into each other accidentially, however, is *extremely* low.

“Space is big. *Really* 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, but that’s just peanuts to space.” – *The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy*

That being said, it’s true. Most satellites aren’t very big, but for the sake of making things easy let’s say they’re all the size of a school bus. Your average school bus is 35 feet long. The circumference of the Earth is 24,901 miles at the equator. That means you can line 3,756,493 school busses end-to-end along the equator and still have a little bit of space left over.

Now, a circular geosynchronous orbit is at an altitude of 26,194 miles (give or take). That’s a circumference of 164,582 miles, or 24,828,370 school busses with a little bit of space left over.

There’s *plenty* of room up there.

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