If there are many satellites orbiting earth, how do space launches not bump into any of them?
In: 2066
We track them all. A lot of it is just keeping a database up to date of the different orbits. The us government NORAD program has a fence across the earth that they use to detect objects in space and track them. We then made a standard to exchange that information. It describes the orbit of the object. It’s fairly simple math.
https://www.n2yo.com/satellites/
https://celestrak.org/NORAD/documentation/gp-data-formats.php
http://gpredict.oz9aec.net
But regardless, space is mostly empty. Even if we didn’t know where they are, hitting them by accident just won’t happen. The main reason we track sats is so we know where to point our antennas to talk to them.
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