Beijing, which complained to the United Nations space agency earlier this month, believes Washington is failing to oversee Musk’s space ambitions. His company SpaceX has launched nearly 1,900 satellites for Starlink, a network that aims to bring high-speed internet via satellites to the most inhospitable places on Earth.
On July 1, the Chinese had to swerve on the Tianhe to avoid a collision with Starlink 1095. On October 21, Starlink 2305 ‘continuously’ changed course, preventing the Chinese astronauts from assessing the orbit of the satellite and having to dodge again.
In an unusual move, the Chinese UN envoy is asking the UN to share this information with all member states. China points to treaties that hold governments accountable for national activities in the universe, whether carried out by government agencies or other parties. On Tuesday, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry again criticized the US government for “ignoring” international obligations and threatening the lives of the three astronauts on the Tianhe.
Oil on the fire
In recent days, Chinese internet users have denounced Musk’s satellites as ‘a pile of space junk’. Starlink’s failure to respond to the Chinese complaints is adding fuel to the fire: Chinese internet users are now calling for a boycott of Tesla via a hashtag that has been viewed more than 87 million times. Musk is a celebrity in China thanks to his popular electric car. Tesla has a factory in Shanghai, and sells a quarter of the cars produced there on the Chinese market.
There are now almost 30,000 satellites and pieces of debris floating around the earth. A lot of space scrap comes from Chinese space projects. Scientists are urging governments to share data about those objects to reduce the risk of collisions.
According to experts at the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute for Astrophysics, that risk has increased significantly due to the Starlink program, which sent the first satellites into space in 2018. Musk has permission from the US government to launch many more satellites, a total of 12,000. With Starlink he wants to compete with providers of wired internet connections.
Earlier, Musk has said that the software in some Starlink satellites automatically adjusts the orbit to reduce the chance of collisions. Musk tweeted this in response to a canceled spacewalk by the American space agency NASA, which in November thought the risk of collisions with space debris was too great.
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