Currently 2.8 days to a low orbit collision disaster according to a new CRASH clock

Bad news! Is the low orbit space becoming overcrowded? Then there is already all the existing space junk floating. Questions like this were frequently raised during the past several decades. Like questions about space junk.

I have just blogged here about the debris dangers to air traffic caused by the recent explosion of the SpaceX Starship.

Recent news suggest there are plans to build data centers in space and so on.

"... Calculations show that, across all low-Earth orbit mega-constellations, a "close approach," defined as two satellites passing by each at less than 1km separation, occurs every 22 seconds. For Starlink alone, that number is once every 11 minutes. Another known metric of Starlink is that, on average, each of the thousands of satellites have to perform 41 maneuvers per year to avoid running into other objects in their orbit. ..."

From the abstract:

"The number of objects in orbit is rapidly increasing, primarily driven by the launch of megaconstellations, an approach to satellite constellation design that involves large numbers of satellites paired with their rapid launch and disposal. While satellites provide many benefits to society, their use comes with challenges, including the growth of space debris, collisions, ground casualty risks, optical and radio-spectrum pollution, and the alteration of Earth's upper atmosphere through rocket emissions and reentry ablation.
There is substantial potential for current or planned actions in orbit to cause serious degradation of the orbital environment or lead to catastrophic outcomes, highlighting the urgent need to find better ways to quantify stress on the orbital environment.

Here we propose a new metric, the CRASH Clock, that measures such stress in terms of the time it takes for a catastrophic collision to occur if there are no collision avoidance manoeuvres or there is a severe loss in situational awareness. Our calculations show the CRASH Clock is currently 2.8 days, which suggests there is now little time to recover from a wide-spread disruptive event, such as a solar storm. This is in stark contrast to the pre-megaconstellation era: in 2018, the CRASH Clock was 121 days."

2.8 days to disaster: Why we are running out of time in low earth orbit

An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions (open access)

RSO = resident space object