If there are many satellites orbiting earth, how do space launches not bump into any of them?
In: 2066
The problem is that your definition of “big” is not big enough. When Douglas Adams says, “space is big,” he really means it. Imagine throwing a dart at the screen of your monitor and hitting one exact particular pixel to cause a collision. Space, even just the volume of low-Earth orbit, is much bigger than that.
Having said that, SpaceX recently disclosed that their giant sat network performed over 20000 evasion maneuvers in the past year.
Just coming close to another satellite is dangerous because you can imagine each satellite existing within a small cloud of paint chips and dust, all of which is going 17000 mph. Touch it and you don’t just die, you make a bigger cloud of debris. The runaway result of that is called, “Kessler Syndrome” and all the evasions are, in part, an effort to avoid that.
Edit: Or here’s another way to look at it. The volume of LEO is considerably larger than all the lakes and oceans of the world. How do submarines not bump into each other?
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