Honestly, these two paragraphs are one of the most compelling things they could possibly say in a press release:<p>> 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.<p>> 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.<p>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!
This seems necessary and desirable, but pretty much a government function. I can't see how simple good-faith cooperation prevents abuse.<p>Possible abuses:<p>(1) Use the information to actually interfere or collide with satellites<p>(2) Use the information to track secret satellites by excluding traces from non-secret ones<p>(3) Free riders gaining secondary access without providing data<p>(4) Use access to this when traffic is more contended to enforce hegemony<p>(5) Anti-competitive coordination under the rubric of cooperation<p>And while the system might be helpful under ordinary peacetime conditions, will it make a war more or less destructive?<p>It's silly that NASA is planning for Mars and the moon but hasn't already solved this coordination problem on a world scale.
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.<p>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.
Damn it. I wanted to use that name
"To maximize safety for all satellites in space, SpaceX will be making Stargaze conjunction data available to all operators, free of charge, via its space-traffic management platform."<p>Many people don't still realize it, but the problem of low orbit debris is only getting worse. So, this is a really nice gesture. Thank you, Elon Musk.
The one advantage of monopolies is that they tend the commons.
It sounds like a hook, like "don't like all the space debris? use our management platform" and then it'll suddenly start costing money
[flagged]
Would this sort of operational prowess be possible if it weren't for Musk? Will the future be kind and reflect back in the hindsight when Musk dies?
> Will the future be kind and reflect back in the hindsight when Musk dies?<p>id hazard a guess and say it will, people love to hero worship but he's his own biggest fan. nothing he built wasnt done before in some way. if im being generous id say hes a good integrator of tech, which in itself isnt such a bad thing, if thats all it was.
better stay out of biography books
I wonder what you have to say about our new generation fertilizers and vaccines.
I usually don't comment on politically charged topics (because I don't shit where I eat), but the amount of champagne socialists around here is borderline Reddit and its negatively influencing the discoverability of the news I'm coming here to see.<p>Like... SpaceX is the world leader in rocket and satellite tech. This site is supposed to be about tech. Not to mention that the article itself is really interesting. Yet you come in here and dump your musky load like it's a public toilet. What the hell is wrong with you.
I was just having this discussion in the other thread where people were blatantly lying about Tesla because they hate Elon Musk. Hate him all you want, but his companies are truly successful.
I was just thinking about that the other day while relaxing in my Hyperloop pod from Los Angeles to San Francisco. I was reminiscing about how I'd avoided all the traffic in LA by using the Boring Company's tunnels in my second-generation Tesla Roadster. I'd been in LA for a conference about the hugely successful Starship space launch system, which has revolutionized cost to orbit with fully reusable second stages. When I got to San Francisco, I hopped in a Tesla fully self-driving robotaxi, and when I got home, my Optimus robot served me tea after I instructed it to do so using my Neuralink probe. I then sent a video voicemail to my parents, who live in a city of 1 million people on Mars, which has recently been terraformed. I flipped on CNN and was gratified to see that, for the first time in 25 years, the US government was operating at a surplus, thanks to the $2T of annual savings delivered by DOGE.
There it is... the usual ELON MUSK BAD.
Who knew that Big Brother would name himself after a 1990s movie about a completely different premise?