If there are many satellites orbiting earth, how do space launches not bump into any of them?
In: 2066
For many satellites, the largest part is the solar panels. The US produces about the area of a tennis court annually for space applications. The rest of the world roughly matches us. So the current total area of annually launched spacecraft is less than about 4 tennis courts. We have been launching satellites since about 1960, so just over 60 years. At most we have put up 240 tennis courts worth of area into space. Much of that has burned back in, so you can safely assume that there is no more than say 150 tennis courts worth of material in orbit. That is less than the size of a freeway inside the loop of any moderate sized city. Your odds of randomly hitting man-made space material when just flying into deep space are virtually zero.
The problem with space junk is there are some orbits that are highly used for some particular applications, junk in those orbits, or crossing those orbits will cause problems.
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