Elon Musk defends Starlink satellites following China's complaint to UN; 'they're tiny'

Hours after China detailed the United Nations about its evasive maneuvers to dodge collisions with SpaceX’s Starlink twice, the founder of Space company Elon Musk has come out to defend it. Speaking to Financial Times, Musk asserted that space was “just extremely enormous” and the spacecraft which he was sending into it “is very tiny,” indicating that the situation is not as dire as it seems. On December 6, Beijing had filed a complaint with the UN citing two incidences- on July 1 and October 21-when it had to maneuver the core module of its space station to avoid collisions with internet-beaming Starlink satellites.

Since its inception, Space X has deployed nearly 2,000 satellites into space for its Starlink broadband communications network and there are thousands more on the way. On Wednesday, Musk said that each of the “orbital shells” encircling the earth has an orbit larger than the planet’s surface. Additionally, all the shells are situated at a distance of more than 10 meters from each other or at so further out in the space.

"That would imply room for tens of billions of satellites", he said. "A couple of thousand satellites is nothing. It's like, hey, here are a couple of thousand of cars on Earth — it's nothing", Musk added likening his satellites to automobiles on earth. 

Space Congestion and China's complaint

On Monday, China said that the core module of its space station- Tianhe-was forced to take evasive action in a bid to avoid collision with American billionaire Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites. In the document submitted by China to the UN’s space agency, Beijing said that the satellites from Starlink Internet Services had two “close encounters” with the Chinese space station on July 1 and October 21. It also said that at least three Chinese astronauts were aboard the station when the incident took place.

The Chinese authorities informed that the Starlink satellites descended to lower orbits, which could be to enhance the satellite’s regional communication capacity as the company also planned to launch a batch of satellites into an orbit of around 330km. For now, SpaceX or the American Administration has not responded to China’s complaints.

(Image: AP)