Elon Musk denies allegations that his satellites are squeezing his competitors in the air

Elon Musk responded by criticizing his company’s Starlink satellites for storing more space in the atmosphere, and instead said there could be “tens of billions” of spacecraft circling around Earth.

“The space is huge, and the satellites are small,” Musk said. “This is not the first time we have banned others in any way. We have not stopped anyone from doing anything, and we do not expect to do so.”

His comments, which he interviewed with the Financial Times, came in response to what Josef Aschbacher, head of the European Space Agency, says Musk was. “making rules” about the new economy of the business world. Speaking to FT earlier this month, Aschbacher warned that Musk’s rush to release thousands of connected satellites would leave fewer radios and orbital gaps available to anyone.

SpaceX, the private company Musk, has already installed about 2,000 satellites on its Starlink Broadband network and has thousands more plans.

Rejecting the idea of ​​”pushing out” future competitors, Musk compared the number of satellites under Earth orbit with what he said were 2bn vehicles and vehicles on Earth. Each “bullet” orbiting the Earth is much larger than the surface of the planet, he said, with a diameter of 10 feet[10 m]or more.

“That would mean that there are billions of satellites,” he said. “Thousands of satellites are empty. It’s like, hey, here are a few thousand cars on Earth – nothing.”

Some analysts have criticized Musk’s claim that satellites under Earth orbit could be proportional to the number of vehicles and vehicles on Earth.

Aircraft with a distance of 17,000 mph require more separation than vehicles to allow time to change course if a collision is detected, says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. At that speed, a three-second difference would only leave 1,000 satellites at each orbital shell, he calculated.

A collision that can be detected not only near the time it can occur is due to the difficulty of calculating the path of various satellites, but also because the changing weather patterns affect their orbits, said McDowell.

“For most site users, planning a route with a minimum of hours if not days, then this indicates that the site is already full,” he said.

China he complained this month when two Starlink satellites forced Chinese aviation to implement “collision-preventing measures” in October and July to “ensure the safety and lives of astronauts”.

Laura Forczyk, an aerospace expert for the Astralytical space agency, said Musk’s comparison of satellites and vehicles on Earth was “nonsense”, but added: “She is right that it is a traffic problem.”

Competition to establish new networks connected to thousands of satellites demonstrated greater need very close between states to decide “how orbital space should be allocated and how much space should be controlled”, he said.

Forczyk said Aslbacher’s criticism of Starlink “was based on speculation, not reality”.

“I should be surprised if similar complaints were made when other airlines started flying more and more flights in the established ways. There are no sky owners and they are all free to use,” he said.