https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/blue-origin-we-want-to...
Some short googling says they have lasers that clear a path for a data carrying beam, but that seems wasteful/infeasible for commercial uses
"Even Earth’s atmosphere interferes with optical communications. Clouds and mist can interrupt a laser. A solution to this is building multiple ground stations, which are telescopes on Earth that receive infrared waves. If it’s cloudy at one station, the waves can be redirected to a different ground station. With more ground stations, the network can be more flexible during bad weather. SCaN is also investigating multiple approaches, like Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking and satellite arrays to help deal with challenges derived from atmospheric means."
https://www.nasa.gov/technology/space-comms/optical-communic...
Some more info on Optical Communications for Satellites: https://www.kiss.caltech.edu/workshops/optcomm/presentations...
They don't seem to mention using optical for their own ground stations - maybe too unreliable?
Twenty of them at 100,000 birds each to start approaching the density of planes in the sky [1]. Not around an airport. In all of the sky. Oceans and all.
Practically speaking, this is not a pressing concern for our generation.
The SEA parking garage fits 12,000 cars in it. Two of those spread over the entire planet would be an imperceptible amount of space. You could drop a pin on a map your entire life and probably never hit one.
Satellites need to travel at 8 km/s to not fall down.
Not really. You're correct inasmuch as it increases collision energies. But it also increases momentum, which maintains orbital integrity within predictable bounds. Nobody is maneuvering around satellites, they–and their debris–stay where the math tells them to.
The other underestimated dimension is that satellite manoeuvres use up a finite supply of expensively-launched propellant. That's tolerable when Starlink is doing 50k conjunction avoidance manoeuvres in six months across its constellation, but once it becomes weekly you either need bigger satellites carrying more propellant or have to accept significantly higher collision risk than they currently do.
Randomly place 50,000 shoe boxes up and down the entire eastern seaboard.
Randomly place 50,000 shoe boxes up and down the entire western seaboard.
Send them in straight lines towards the other side of the country.
See if any collide. Almost certainly none of them will.
For reference, if you placed all 50k boxes next to each other on the same beach, it would be about 10 miles wide. The total shoreline on either side would be ~1800 miles wide.
And that's only 2D.
This is the paper they cite [1] estimates "the no-manoeuvre collision time" for various orbits. It has no alarming results.
That paper cites another paper [2], which raises the possibility of runaway conditions, but not in a particularly rigorous way.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09643
[2] https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc9/paper/3...
Same as with any dropped packet.
https://www.blueorigin.com/news/blue-origin-introduces-teraw...
>The TeraWave architecture consists of 5,408 optically interconnected satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO).
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/blue-origin-we-want-to... ("Another Jeff Bezos company has announced plans to develop a megaconstellation")
Bezos can't even build his first constellation and already planning his second... Possibly the real play here is snapping up more frequency licenses on earth (we need them because we're launching any day now promise). They are the real constraining resource and could be used to keep others out of the market for a while.
I'd love to see a betting market on a unified, global licensing regime lasting for another ten years.
Before the "new wave", in 2010-2015 or so, Earth had around 1500 active satellites in orbit, and another 2,000-2,500 defunct ones.
Starlink now has almost 9,500 satellites in orbit, has approvals for 12,000 and long-term plans for up to 42,000. Blue Origin has added 5,500 to that. Amazon plans for 3,000. China has two megaconstellations under construction, for a total of 26,000, and has filed for even larger systems, up to 200,000 satellites.
We might be the last generation that is able to watch the stars.
I'm not convinced this is a major issue, but I'd like to hear arguments for why it is.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't LEO satellites only going to reflect light from the sun when they're at low angles near sunrise and sunset? For night time stargazing, they're going to be in Earth's shadow, too.
The amount of light they reflect back is also small. They can be seen if you look closely at just the right time, but I don't understand how this is supposed to be so much light that it starts raising the overall background light level considerably. The satellites are small and can only reflect so much.
Is it just annoyance that they're up there and showing up in photos?
Iridium's LEO satellites were sometimes (impressively) visible after midnight.
I have no idea if the number is actually a lot shrug but it's surely different than cars on a planet's surface
They're extremely sparse. Imagine putting 12,000 satellites randomly over the surface of the Earth. You're just not going to bump into one, statistically. Now expand that into 3D space in an orbital zone above us.
It's not a collision risk.
There is. We don't have the industrial capacity, as a species, to do it.
Space is huge. Try this trick: the number of satellites in orbit is about the same as the number of planes in the air at any time. (~12,000 [1].)
The volume of space from the ground to 50,000 feet is about 200x smaller than the volume from the Karman line to the top of LEO alone (~2,000 km).
Put another way, we approach the density of planes in the sky in LEO when there are milliions of satellites in that space alone. Picture what happens if every plane in the sky fell to the ground. Now understand that the same thing happening in LEO, while it occurs at higher energy, also occurs in less-occupied space and will eventually (mostly) burn up in the atmosphere.
Put another way, you could poof every Starlink simultaneously and while it would be tremendously annoying, most satellites orbiting lower would be able to get out of the way, those that couldn't wouldn't cause much more damage, the whole mess would be avoidable for most and entirely gone within a few years.
There are serious problems with space pollution. Catastrophic Kessler cascades that block humans from space, or knock out all of our satellites, aren't one of them.
[1] https://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/number-of...
For a given period of time, a single satellite will travel through a vastly larger volume of space than a single plane.