In a complaint submitted to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs earlier this month, China claims that satellites for SpaceX’s Starlink Internet Services had two “close encounters” with the country’s under-development Tiangong Space Station — one on July 1 and another on October 21, forcing the space station to take evasive action to avoid collision (via Yahoo News).
“For safety reasons, the China Space Station implemented preventive collision avoidance control,” said China in the complaint.
While the complaint has not been independently verified as of yet, Chinese social media is ablaze, lashing out against SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and his high-speed satellite broadband service.
One user on China’s Twitter-like social media platform Weibo said Starlink’s satellites were “just a pile of space junk”, while another called them “American space warfare weapons”.
“The risks of Starlink are being gradually exposed, the whole human race will pay for their business activities,” said Weibo user Chen Haiying.
Starlink has positioned close to 2,000 satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO) so far, with plans to add thousands more.
The satellite internet service has received well over 500,000 orders, and already has more than 90,000 users in 12 countries. SpaceX is continuously working on adding even more regions to the Starlink network.
When NASA was forced to abruptly call off a spacewalk in late November due to risks posed by space debris, Musk tweeted in response to say that some Starlink satellite orbits had been adjusted to reduce the possibility of collisions.
SpaceX has yet to officially comment on this matter.
