Now I would really love to know who the other operator was.

NitpickLawyer 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> In a statement posted on social media late Dec. 12, Michael Nicolls, vice president of Starlink engineering at SpaceX, said a satellite launched on a Kinetica-1 rocket from China two days earlier passed within 200 meters of a Starlink satellite.

> CAS Space, the Chinese company that operates the Kinetica-1 rocket, said in a response that it was looking into the incident and that its missions “select their launch windows using the ground-based space awareness system to avoid collisions with known satellites/debris.” The company later said the close approach occurred nearly 48 hours after payload separation, long after its responsibilities for the launch had ended.

> The satellite from the Chinese launch has yet to be identified and is listed only as “Object J” with the NORAD identification number 67001 in the Space-Track database. The launch included six satellites for Chinese companies and organizations, as well as science and educational satellites from Egypt, Nepal and the United Arab Emirates.

▲

ge96 an hour ago | parent [-]

> 48 hours after payload separation, long after its responsibilities for the launch had ended

This is funny, the way things are just discarded in space, not our problem anymore vs. deorbit

	▲	panzagl 29 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think this is more that the offending satellite was at that point the responsibility of the satellite operator, not the launch operator.
	▲	NitpickLawyer 29 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think they are saying "this is not on us, this is on the sat operator". Which may or may not be true, who knows.

▲

jacquesm 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And what the goal of that maneuver was.

▲

phkahler 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It seems like it deliberately came close to the Starlink sat, but the "why" is still a good question.

	▲	bell-cot 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		A test SpaceX's awareness & response would be ample reason.

▲

ge96 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Cause problems and deny it