Rocket Lab Electron Flight 10 Aborted

[Graeme1858]

The launch of Rocket Lab Electron flight 10 was aborted this morning to avoid the possibility of getting too close to an object already in space during today's launch.

If that's the case now, what's it going to be like when there's another 42 thousand satellites up there?

https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/11/29/r ... us-center/

Regards

Graeme

[GCoyote]

A fair question.

[mikemarotta]

If that's the case now, what's it going to be like when there's another 42 thousand satellites up there?

At scifi fete Armadillo Con 41 in Austin, Texas, last summer, our Science Guest was Moriba Jah (now at UT) who tracks space debris in non-Newtonian paths. (Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriba_Jah )

The problem, such as it is, (my opinion, not Dr. Jah's) is the lack of property rights. No one owns orbits, so anyone can do anything they can get away with. It is the tragedy of the commons. See the posts here about the the SpaceX "Starlink" cluster launch. There's a neologism: cluster launch.

Just to take a contrarian stance, though, at our club's public outreach star parties, we are happy to be able to point to the ISS. Given enough time, one or more other (anonymous) satellites will pass over and people are pretty interested in being able to see them, no different than any other object in the sky. Maybe we just don't look up enough. If you ask most people to point "halfway up" the sky, they stop about at about a third. Soon enough with dozens or hundreds of little lights in the night sky, the stars and planets will stand out in contrast. Funny to think of planets as being among the things that do not move...