To ease the required manual effort, the vision for the CREAM system takes over a great number of related activities: evaluate potential conjunctions, generate manoeuvre plans and support with the decision-making process, coordination with other operators, as well as monitoring by potential future regulators.
I didn’t realise we were still doing this manually. As the vast majority of satellite orbits are catalogued, this seems like a perfect candidate for automation.
“We’ll just dodge stuff forever!” - Humanity’s plan on dealing with exponentially increasing space junk.
“We’ll deploy satellite constellations of thousands to tens of thousands so people can talk on their cellphones in the middle of the ocean” - Humanity’s plan on reducing satellites in orbit, which is the major cause of space junk.
satellite constellations of thousands to tens of thousands
As long as the constellations aren’t deployed above ~600 km (*glares at Guowang*), they shouldn’t pose a long-term debris risk.
You’re not wrong, but many of the satellites are dual use and would be up for the military anyways, because not having them or not having access to them means being vulnerable.
I think cleaning space junk up is more viable than finally achieving a stable world peace, as humans historically never had a single day without an overlapping armed conflict in > 6000 years. It’s sad, but war is kinda our thing.
