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You might say it was inevitable. With 50,000 satellites and more than 100,000 trackable pieces of debris, Earth’s orbital zone was too crowded for comfort. Something had to give.
Two days ago the collision of a defunct rocket booster with a Starlink Maxi satellite caused a trail of destruction in low earth orbit. Like toppling dominoes, chunks of metal smashed into one satellite, then another, and another, spreading in a chain reaction through most of the Starlink constellation.
The dreaded Kessler Syndrome. A disaster scenario that finally became a reality.Now there’s a chaotic belt of space junk swarming around Earth, killing off many of the remaining weather and communications satellites, and probably military ones too.
Global internet coverage, often direct to your phone, just died. Gone is the ability to connect everywhere and anywhere, on a ship, a plane or in the middle of Nowhere, Alaska. And it’s going to take a long time, and an awful lot of cash, to get it back.
Except for one thing. Remember all those wonderful fibre cables running underground and under the oceans? They’re back in business in a big way, and Wi-Fi hotspots are all the rage again. Until Starlink came along and disrupted the global networks, they were the way we all got high-speed internet.
Businesses and homes are scrambling to resubscribe to the fibre network operators they so casually spurned as too costly in the past. And sitting in the pound seats are two tech giants that stuck with fibre throughout: Google and Amazon. Both have owned their own submarine cables and redundant fibre networks for decades, for security as well as commercial reasons.
When every other network is down, Google and Amazon are always up and running.
First published on Mindbullets January 9 2025.
Rockets are grounded and space explorers stranded
Dateline: February 16 2037
It’s a fact: we are stuck on Earth indefinitely while our brave explorers fight for their lives on the Moon, on Mars, and in the asteroid belt’s mining communities. The nightmare scenario, the Kessler Syndrome, materialised again yesterday.
A commercial satellite launch malfunctioned, with the rocket and payload tumbling uncontrolled and at full speed into the low Earth orbital plane, crashing into a number of Starlink satellites. The debris generated by the collisions cascaded laterally and outward, creating the Kessler Syndrome — a hailstorm of high-velocity debris smashing into other satellites, initiating a chain reaction of more collisions and even more debris. Not only did it wipe out the satellites in low Earth orbit, but it spread within a couple of hours all the way out to geostationary orbit, obliterating both GPS and weather satellites.
“The worldwide traffic chaos experienced overnight is a direct result of our cars and machines losing the GPS network,” a Nasa director explained. “We should be glad most of us don’t access the internet via satellites.” Those who do have lost all connectivity.
It will probably take weeks, if not months, to clear the traffic jams. Agriculture and food deliveries have ground to a halt, and flights will be severely delayed. The initial analysis has shown that the orbital planes are so full of debris that traversing through them, or even replacing the satellites, is not technically possible. Hundreds of astronauts inhabiting the four Moon bases and MarsOne, and mining the asteroid belt are stranded and left to fend for themselves.
Crisis teams at Nasa, CNSA in China, ESA in Europe and Russia’s Roscosmos are already looking at various ways of clearing a path for new spacecraft launches. Rumours include solutions such as using the Asteroid Defence Co-operative’s nuclear rockets to blast through the debris or using high-powered lasers to vaporise orbiting junk.
Meanwhile, SpaceX is planning an exploratory mission to the edge of the debris field next week. Its reusable Starships are ideal for a less violent way of dealing with the debris and can scoop up bigger pieces with graphene “nets”. “We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to clean up space and remove obsolete satellites,” SpaceX spokesperson Dan Woyzek explained.
Whichever solution is selected, it may take years before we can resume normal space flight or have a functioning GPS system again. Until we have developed a way to use cellphone and Wi-Fi networks for precise navigation, we won’t have autonomous vehicles, Google Maps, predictive food deliveries or reliable supply chains.
First published on Mindbullets February 16 2023.
Despite appearances to the contrary, Futureworld cannot and does not predict the future. The Mindbullets scenarios are fictitious and designed purely to explore possible futures, and challenge and stimulate strategic thinking.
Support our award-winning journalism. The Premium package (digital only) is R30 for the first month and thereafter you pay R129 p/m now ad-free for all subscribers.
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Dateline: January 8 2033
You might say it was inevitable. With 50,000 satellites and more than 100,000 trackable pieces of debris, Earth’s orbital zone was too crowded for comfort. Something had to give.
Two days ago the collision of a defunct rocket booster with a Starlink Maxi satellite caused a trail of destruction in low earth orbit. Like toppling dominoes, chunks of metal smashed into one satellite, then another, and another, spreading in a chain reaction through most of the Starlink constellation.
The dreaded Kessler Syndrome. A disaster scenario that finally became a reality. Now there’s a chaotic belt of space junk swarming around Earth, killing off many of the remaining weather and communications satellites, and probably military ones too.
Global internet coverage, often direct to your phone, just died. Gone is the ability to connect everywhere and anywhere, on a ship, a plane or in the middle of Nowhere, Alaska. And it’s going to take a long time, and an awful lot of cash, to get it back.
Except for one thing. Remember all those wonderful fibre cables running underground and under the oceans? They’re back in business in a big way, and Wi-Fi hotspots are all the rage again. Until Starlink came along and disrupted the global networks, they were the way we all got high-speed internet.
Businesses and homes are scrambling to resubscribe to the fibre network operators they so casually spurned as too costly in the past. And sitting in the pound seats are two tech giants that stuck with fibre throughout: Google and Amazon. Both have owned their own submarine cables and redundant fibre networks for decades, for security as well as commercial reasons.
When every other network is down, Google and Amazon are always up and running.
First published on Mindbullets January 9 2025.
Rockets are grounded and space explorers stranded
Dateline: February 16 2037
It’s a fact: we are stuck on Earth indefinitely while our brave explorers fight for their lives on the Moon, on Mars, and in the asteroid belt’s mining communities. The nightmare scenario, the Kessler Syndrome, materialised again yesterday.
A commercial satellite launch malfunctioned, with the rocket and payload tumbling uncontrolled and at full speed into the low Earth orbital plane, crashing into a number of Starlink satellites. The debris generated by the collisions cascaded laterally and outward, creating the Kessler Syndrome — a hailstorm of high-velocity debris smashing into other satellites, initiating a chain reaction of more collisions and even more debris. Not only did it wipe out the satellites in low Earth orbit, but it spread within a couple of hours all the way out to geostationary orbit, obliterating both GPS and weather satellites.
“The worldwide traffic chaos experienced overnight is a direct result of our cars and machines losing the GPS network,” a Nasa director explained. “We should be glad most of us don’t access the internet via satellites.” Those who do have lost all connectivity.
It will probably take weeks, if not months, to clear the traffic jams. Agriculture and food deliveries have ground to a halt, and flights will be severely delayed. The initial analysis has shown that the orbital planes are so full of debris that traversing through them, or even replacing the satellites, is not technically possible. Hundreds of astronauts inhabiting the four Moon bases and MarsOne, and mining the asteroid belt are stranded and left to fend for themselves.
Crisis teams at Nasa, CNSA in China, ESA in Europe and Russia’s Roscosmos are already looking at various ways of clearing a path for new spacecraft launches. Rumours include solutions such as using the Asteroid Defence Co-operative’s nuclear rockets to blast through the debris or using high-powered lasers to vaporise orbiting junk.
Meanwhile, SpaceX is planning an exploratory mission to the edge of the debris field next week. Its reusable Starships are ideal for a less violent way of dealing with the debris and can scoop up bigger pieces with graphene “nets”. “We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to clean up space and remove obsolete satellites,” SpaceX spokesperson Dan Woyzek explained.
Whichever solution is selected, it may take years before we can resume normal space flight or have a functioning GPS system again. Until we have developed a way to use cellphone and Wi-Fi networks for precise navigation, we won’t have autonomous vehicles, Google Maps, predictive food deliveries or reliable supply chains.
First published on Mindbullets February 16 2023.
Despite appearances to the contrary, Futureworld cannot and does not predict the future. The Mindbullets scenarios are fictitious and designed purely to explore possible futures, and challenge and stimulate strategic thinking.
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