Social media is heavily criticizing billionaire Elon Musk after China issued a complaint stating that SpaceX satellites, Starlink Internet services, was almost going to collide with China’s satellite.
The Collision Incident
Beijing reported that there were two “close encounters”, on July 1st and October 21st respectively and it would have caused major damage.
An official document acted as the complaint that has been lodged, however, the UN’s space agency is yet to respond to the matter.
As per the document given in the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, during the first almost-collision incident, SpaceX’s satellite had a major drop. It was initially orbiting at an altitude of approx. 555 km but then gradually dropped to 382 km.
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The whole dropping session happened from May 16th to June 24th. Due to this unforeseen altitude drop, there was a high “collision risk” that could have happened on 1st July between Starlink and China’s Tiangong Space Station.
Further reports state that the Chinese space station had to perform an “evasive maneuver” to “avoid a potential collision between the two spacecraft”.
Moreover, the same thing occurred on 21st October and the Chinese space station was forced to conduct another “evasive maneuver” to prevent any sort of damage.
In the document that has been published, Beijing commented, “For safety reasons, the China Space Station implemented preventive collision avoidance control“.
The Permanent Mission of China mentioned to the United Nation, “As the satellite was continuously maneuvering, the maneuver strategy was unknown and orbital errors were hard to be assessed, there was thus a collision risk between the Starlink-2305 satellite and the China Space Station”.
Twitter Backlash
When this comment was brought to the notice of the public, citizens expressed their unhappiness towards Tesla founder, Musk, and the US in Weibo, a microblogging platform of China.
Now, China even accused the US of its ignorant behavior and not acknowledging the space treaties. This incident could have been a threat for the astronauts if not taken care of by the Chinese space station.
The online criticism even highlighted the fact that Musk’s satellites are nothing more than “space junks”.
This topic has gone immensely viral and almost 900 million views were garnered by the Starlink fiasco.
The request from China to the UN secretary-general mentioned the point that they must abide by the UN Outer Space Treaty.
The UN must remind all the states about their international responsibility when functioning in outer space. It is applicable for both governments as well as non-government bodies.
Billionaire Elon Musk is quite a name in China where Tesla has a clear dominance with its electric vehicles. He also has an active Weibo account where he shares his views freely.
Even during July, Musk took to Weibo to sing praises of China’s economic prosperity as the Communist Party’s 100th anniversary.
However, that didn’t stop Chinese Twitter from criticizing his actions.
One user tweeted, “The risks of Starlink are being gradually exposed, the whole human race will pay for their business activities.”
Many others went on to write, “American space warfare weapons” and “Musk is a new ‘weapon’ created by the US government and military”.
Currently, there are 30,000 satellites in outer space and many debris are orbiting freely around our Earth. Now, Starlink alone has launched around 1900 satellites and plans on increasing the numbers in the future.
Scientists have already expressed their concerns and such a collision would have increased the debris content in space. So, all the nations need to act responsibly for safety and also protect the space from getting heavily polluted. It’s better late than never!
