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Honestly, these two paragraphs are one of the most compelling things they could possibly say in a press release:
> Stargaze already has a proven track record in its utility for space safety. In late 2025, a Starlink satellite encountered a conjunction with a third-party satellite that was performing maneuvers, but whose operator was not sharing ephemeris. Until five hours before the conjunction, the close approach was anticipated to be ~9,000 meters—considered a safe miss-distance with zero probability of collision. With just five hours to go, the third-party satellite performed a maneuver which changed its trajectory and collapsed the anticipated miss distance to just ~60 meters. Stargaze quickly detected this maneuver and published an updated trajectory to the screening platform, generating new CDMs which were immediately distributed to relevant satellites. Ultimately, the Starlink satellite was able to react within an hour of the maneuver being detected, planning an avoidance maneuver to reduce collision risk back down to zero.
> With so little time to react, this would not have been possible by relying on legacy radar systems or high-latency conjunction screening processes. If observations of the third-party satellite were less frequent, conjunction screening took longer, or the reaction required human approval, such an event might not have been successfully mitigated.
Looks like a non-trivial upgrade to previous systems, and they're making Stargaze's data available to other satellite operators free of charge. Nice!
By close04 2026-01-3012:59 > they're making Stargaze's data available to other satellite operators free of charge
With so many Starlink satellites odds are that one false move on anyone's part ends up in an incident involving them. Sharing this data makes the field safer for everyone, and Starlink gets to steer clear of any bad news titles.
It will be interesting when multiple parties are using these systems and still failing to communicate out of band. Like trying to pass someone in a hallway who keeps trying to make the same course correction as you until you both make eye contact and come to a real agreement.
By imglorp 2026-01-311:42 > still failing to communicate out of band.
I don't understand countries or operators that do this.
There's no secrets about hardware position and orbit. Even amateur astronomers can track spacecraft.
There's no benefit to trashing orbit from failure to coordinate and cooperate. Any collision in LEO will deny it to everyone for several years.
So who is being insular and why is it to their advantage?
By infinitewars 2026-01-3018:21 When you're SpaceX and building this[1], others aren't going to try too hard to avoid your satellites..
[1] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_syst...
By NitpickLawyer 2026-01-3011:541 reply > In a statement posted on social media late Dec. 12, Michael Nicolls, vice president of Starlink engineering at SpaceX, said a satellite launched on a Kinetica-1 rocket from China two days earlier passed within 200 meters of a Starlink satellite.
> CAS Space, the Chinese company that operates the Kinetica-1 rocket, said in a response that it was looking into the incident and that its missions “select their launch windows using the ground-based space awareness system to avoid collisions with known satellites/debris.” The company later said the close approach occurred nearly 48 hours after payload separation, long after its responsibilities for the launch had ended.
> The satellite from the Chinese launch has yet to be identified and is listed only as “Object J” with the NORAD identification number 67001 in the Space-Track database. The launch included six satellites for Chinese companies and organizations, as well as science and educational satellites from Egypt, Nepal and the United Arab Emirates.
> 48 hours after payload separation, long after its responsibilities for the launch had ended
This is funny, the way things are just discarded in space, not our problem anymore vs. deorbit
By panzagl 2026-01-3014:09 I think this is more that the offending satellite was at that point the responsibility of the satellite operator, not the launch operator.
By NitpickLawyer 2026-01-3014:091 reply I think they are saying "this is not on us, this is on the sat operator". Which may or may not be true, who knows.
By butvacuum 2026-01-3018:53 unless the sat operator is sueing for a refund because they were put in the wrong orbit... its the sat operator.
By IncreasePosts 2026-01-3015:392 reply If you get hit by a car 5 minutes after you get let off at a bus stop it isn't the bus drivers fault.
By ge96 2026-01-3016:18 Yeah while I didn't directly mention it, I'm referring to stages being discarded in space by a specific party
By thesmtsolver2 2026-01-3016:06 Nah, in this case the driver is the person who gets off and goes and bumps into another person.
It seems like it deliberately came close to the Starlink sat, but the "why" is still a good question.
Weapons test springs to mind, or as a sibling comment suggested a test of Starlink response capabilities.
How confident are we the intent was nefarious? Do you ever see accidental near-misses with this type of flight profile?
The system exists- ergo, people in the know are concerned about accidental collisions.
By jacquesm 2026-01-310:24 Alternative: the system exists, so people in the know may well have done proper risk assessment and may have identified multiple reasons that could result in a collision. Some of those reasons are accidental, some are not.
By notahacker 2026-01-3016:371 reply If so, SpaceX's longer term response being "here's our SSA data for everyone and here's how we source it" is a good one for all parties involved (even more so for SpaceX and govt customers they share it with if they have other capabilities...)
Speculation:
SpaceX has considerably better data than what they disclose, and offer free of charge.
The USSF enjoys full access to that better data, for $[TOP_SECRET]/month.
By notahacker 2026-01-3022:19 Well we already know Starshield (the military version) has specialist space domain awareness capabilities that aren't being shared, and it's entirely plausible that data from regular Starlink sensors/receivers (other than the disclosed star trackers) can be fused into something useful by SpaceX and/or the Space Force.
By ge96 2026-01-3013:34 Cause problems and deny it
By jasonpeacock 2026-01-3017:091 reply > react within an hour of the maneuver being detected
I'm curious at what steps were involved took an hour. Running the calculations should be quick (computers are fast), as is transmitting commands.
This sounds like there's human in the loop that had to make decisions.
By Polizeiposaune 2026-01-3017:561 reply Orbital mechanics can be somewhat counterintuitive.
If you want to change the altitude of your orbit at a certain place, the most efficient place for that is generally when you're on the other side of the planet from that place.
In low earth orbit it takes about 90 minutes to go around the planet, so a small nudge 45 minutes before the potential intercept is going to be vastly more efficient than a big shove when the collision is 5 minutes away.
Starlink uses high efficiency ion thrusters so it has to do small nudges anyway..
So I would not be surprised if most of that hour is spent waiting for the right time to fire the thrusters.
By jasonpeacock 2026-01-3020:21 Maybe I misinterpreted the statement - I thought it was talking about the time from detection to sending the command to the satellite, not the time until the satellite actually took action.
Seems like a generally good idea, the satellites already need to use star trackers, they need an almanac of what should be there so deviations need to be tracked.
I can entirely see the military perspective though, this is almost a direct challenge for any adversary that any maneuver you perform, we will know about it.
The Space Force already tracks satellites (and debris). I imagine this is more of an improvement for small debris such as bolts, etc.
If you're familiar with the technical specs, I'd be interested in hearing what size of objects the star trackers can sense and at what range. In theory the fancier star trackers can see objects around 10 cm diameter hundreds of kilometers away, without needing to worry about a pesky atmosphere [1], but I don't know how sensitive the sensors on Starlink's current generation satellites are, and this web site isn't saying.
They're mostly touting the improvement in latency over existing tracking, from delays measured in hours to ones measured in minutes. Which is very nice, of course, but the lack of other technical detail is mildly frustrating.
[1] https://www.mit.edu/~hamsa/pubs/ShtofenmakherBalakrishnan-IA...
By mikkupikku 2026-01-307:552 reply NASA tracks debris 10cm or larger. They also detect and statistically estimate debris as small as 3mm in LEO.
This is my source, from 2021 fwiw: https://oig.nasa.gov/office-of-inspector-general-oig/ig-21-0...
By wolvoleo 2026-01-3011:41 10cm is huge, that could even be a functioning 1U cubesat.
So it looks to be just the latency improvement that's noteworthy, then. Thank you!
By egl2020 2026-01-3018:36 Maybe coverage, too?
Yes. Sorry for the brief answer. Too bad I got downvoted. There's no size improvement.
It got downvoted because it had no info about why you claimed there was no improvement.
SpaceX wouldn’t waste money developing a system that had no improvement over what space force already offers.
By sfblah 2026-02-0219:00 They would if they could bilk more taxpayer money for it.
By jcims 2026-01-3013:55 Note from analysis in the paper: (CST = Commercial Star Tracker, for which they model several common ones flown on satellites)
>From Fig. 1, it is clear that many typical CSTs can be used to detect debris with characteristic length less than 10 cm at distances as far as roughly 50 km. These same sensors have the potential to detect debris as small as 1 cm in diameter as far as 5 km away. Even space-limited CubeSats using nanosatellite-class CSTs can detect 10-cm-class debris at roughly 25 km away or 1-cm-class debris at a distance of 2.5 km. Higher-performing imagers like the MOST telescope can further characterize orbital debris of 10 cm diameter as far as 400 km away or be used to characterize orbital debris smaller than 1 cm at ranges not exceeding 40 km.
By thatjoeoverthr 2026-01-3013:00 Kessler problems require Kessler solutions
