If there are many satellites orbiting earth, how do space launches not bump into any of them?
In: 2066
First of all, they are all carefully tracked.
Secondly, you are underestimating the size of Earth and space. There are about 7700 satellites orbiting Earth. ALL of Earth. For comparison, there are about 1.5 billion cars on Earth, and there’s easily room for all of them.
Space is huge. In any given orbital altitude around our planet there is more area then the surface of the Earth. And there are hundreds of kilometers of altitude which can contain low orbit satellites. So even though there are a few thousand satellites orbiting the Earth they are very far apart, usually thousands of kilometers apart. The chance of hitting a satellite is therefore extremely small.
In addition to this we built a number of radar trackers during the cold war. And although intended for a different purpose they are excellent at tracking satellites orbiting the planet. So there are public databases of orbiting satellites, both active and dead. You can look up in these databases, calculate the orbital tracks of each of them to find out how close you may come to each of them. As far as I understand this have never resulted in someone changing the launch time.
The bigger danger is the smaller satellites which we can not track because they are too small. There are an unknown number of tiny objects in orbit around the Earth such as paint chips, metal flakes, bolts, weights, wires, etc. A lot of launchers were designed to lose parts in this way and could result in a hundred smaller objects entering orbit. The objects are small and light but when coming inn at a kilometer a second they can still cause quite a bit of damage. A lot of space hardware is therefore designed to withstand some hits. Either by including various types of armour such as kevlar or Whipple shields, or by making the systems redundant enough that a hit will not disable the craft.
Space is huge and there are a lot of different orbits at different altitudes you can place a satellite. You could spend your life living on a satellite and never see another satellite. Or if you did it would just look like a distant star that moves.
There are many ships at sea, how do you manage to launch more ships without bumping into them?
And oceans cover only 70% of earth surface and its 2D surface. In orbit there is also separation in height, by hundreds to thousands of kilometers.
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Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy: “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”
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We consider the edge of space to be 100km high from sea level. Adding to that the radius of earth is 6371 Km.
We have a sphere that has a radius of 6471 km. The surface area of that is 5.26202 times 10^8 square kilometers
526,202,000 square kilometers, more than the earth surface.
If we would move every human onto that surface. Every square kilometer would have about 15 people. If I calculate it correctly, distributed evenly means that there would be about 250m (820 feet) between every single human (calculated from 8 billion)
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There are only a some thousands of satellites out there. If they were distributed uniformly, there would be 100s if not 1000s of kilometers between them
Not to meantion that they are not on the same surface sphere, some are farther, some are closer in 3d space
1. There’s a lot of space out there.
2. All satellites are carefully tracked and the orbits of future satellites are planned accordingly.
For now it’s not an issue but it can possibly be an issue in the future. Time will tell. If we’re smart about it it will never be a problem.
Earths surface is about 200 million square miles. Say you have 8000 satellites in space. That mean each satellite has approximately 25,000 square miles each (about the size of West Virginia).
Imagine being in a field the size of 5 football fields, and you shoot a bullet across it. Then, someone on the right side of the field shot another bullet across. The odds of his bullet hitting your bullet are probably the same as a rocket hitting a satellite.
On top of that, he knows where your bullet is and can shoot it to avoid your bullet.
Think of it this way. If there are many cars on the road, why do you not bump into them when you cross the road? You wait until there is a small time window to cross, and that is when you cross. Sometimes it’s too windy and you wait for a longer distance between cars to cross, but if the weather is really good then you can cross when there is just a little distance between cars
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