Following a successful launch of SpaceX’s Transporter-2 Mission on Wednesday, a new update holds that the U.S. company’s orbital hardware may nearly be on target to collide with an orbiting Russian cargo ship.
A SpaceX Starlink satellite and a Falcon 9 rocket fragment could both be poised to have a near-miss with Russian cargo ship Progress 78, which launched on Tuesday from the International Space Station (ISS), according to Russian space agency Roscosmos (via Space.com).
Progress 78 was launched towards the station carrying nearly 3,600 pounds of cargo including fuel, food, and other supplies for the orbiting space station.
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The Starlink 1691 satellite, which is expected to pass the Progress 78 on Thursday at 5:32 E.T. at a distance of just 0.9 miles (1.5 kilometers) apart. Just three minutes following the first encounter, a Falcon 9 rocket booster which has been in orbit since 2020, is expected to come even closer at a distance of just 0.3 miles (500 meters).
Jonathan McDowell, astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Space.com in an interview the situation was not surprising.
“There’s a lot more stuff in that ‘just below the ISS’ altitude regime than there used to be thanks to Starlink,” said McDowell, adding, “It takes them several months to lower the orbit from 550 km to reentry.”
Last month, Musk also explained briefly why SpaceX lowered Starlink’s satellite orbital altitude, largely due to reducing space junk.
Earlier this year, NASA and SpaceX also signed a Space Act Agreement in order to help avoid collisions in orbital space by employing autonomous maneuvering tactics.
