Seems like a generally good idea, the satellites already need to use star trackers, they need an almanac of what should be there so deviations need to be tracked.
I can entirely see the military perspective though, this is almost a direct challenge for any adversary that any maneuver you perform, we will know about it.
Honestly, these two paragraphs are one of the most compelling things they could possibly say in a press release:
> Stargaze already has a proven track record in its utility for space safety. In late 2025, a Starlink satellite encountered a conjunction with a third-party satellite that was performing maneuvers, but whose operator was not sharing ephemeris. Until five hours before the conjunction, the close approach was anticipated to be ~9,000 meters—considered a safe miss-distance with zero probability of collision. With just five hours to go, the third-party satellite performed a maneuver which changed its trajectory and collapsed the anticipated miss distance to just ~60 meters. Stargaze quickly detected this maneuver and published an updated trajectory to the screening platform, generating new CDMs which were immediately distributed to relevant satellites. Ultimately, the Starlink satellite was able to react within an hour of the maneuver being detected, planning an avoidance maneuver to reduce collision risk back down to zero.
> With so little time to react, this would not have been possible by relying on legacy radar systems or high-latency conjunction screening processes. If observations of the third-party satellite were less frequent, conjunction screening took longer, or the reaction required human approval, such an event might not have been successfully mitigated.
Looks like a non-trivial upgrade to previous systems, and they're making Stargaze's data available to other satellite operators free of charge. Nice!
all this tech is nice and dandy n' all but the guy in charge of it is so distasteful that id rather live in a cave with stone tools than rely on any of it.
"To maximize safety for all satellites in space, SpaceX will be making Stargaze conjunction data available to all operators, free of charge, via its space-traffic management platform."
Many people don't still realize it, but the problem of low orbit debris is only getting worse. So, this is a really nice gesture. Thank you, Elon Musk.
DARPA from long back had a project for tracking space debris related to this. I have an impossibility proof and some other math after many years of thinking about this problem which proves that what they really need (and have explicitly asked for) is impossible but also how theoretically close to it we could get. Hoping to publish soon but working on other things.
I was kinda hoping the collision risk stuff might be what stops the sky quickly getting totally polluted. This is cool but... I presume just enables more and more and more density.
Back in 2020 articles came out on how New Horizons is now so far out that it sees stars differently from its perspective than how we see them on earth.
You basically have thousands of cameras taking constant images of the sky. If you could upgrade the cameras, you could deploy a continuous all-sky astronomical survey as a by-product.
Does anyone know what the "30,000 star trackers" are? There are about that many satellites in orbit, so does this mean almost everyone is contributing data?
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 41.0 ms ] threadI can entirely see the military perspective though, this is almost a direct challenge for any adversary that any maneuver you perform, we will know about it.
> Stargaze already has a proven track record in its utility for space safety. In late 2025, a Starlink satellite encountered a conjunction with a third-party satellite that was performing maneuvers, but whose operator was not sharing ephemeris. Until five hours before the conjunction, the close approach was anticipated to be ~9,000 meters—considered a safe miss-distance with zero probability of collision. With just five hours to go, the third-party satellite performed a maneuver which changed its trajectory and collapsed the anticipated miss distance to just ~60 meters. Stargaze quickly detected this maneuver and published an updated trajectory to the screening platform, generating new CDMs which were immediately distributed to relevant satellites. Ultimately, the Starlink satellite was able to react within an hour of the maneuver being detected, planning an avoidance maneuver to reduce collision risk back down to zero.
> With so little time to react, this would not have been possible by relying on legacy radar systems or high-latency conjunction screening processes. If observations of the third-party satellite were less frequent, conjunction screening took longer, or the reaction required human approval, such an event might not have been successfully mitigated.
Looks like a non-trivial upgrade to previous systems, and they're making Stargaze's data available to other satellite operators free of charge. Nice!
Many people don't still realize it, but the problem of low orbit debris is only getting worse. So, this is a really nice gesture. Thank you, Elon Musk.
Possible abuses:
(1) Use the information to actually interfere or collide with satellites
(2) Use the information to track secret satellites by excluding traces from non-secret ones
(3) Free riders gaining secondary access without providing data
(4) Use access to this when traffic is more contended to enforce hegemony
(5) Anti-competitive coordination under the rubric of cooperation
And while the system might be helpful under ordinary peacetime conditions, will it make a war more or less destructive?
It's silly that NASA is planning for Mars and the moon but hasn't already solved this coordination problem on a world scale.
Getting 30,000 new eyes in the sky actively monitoring objects in orbit seems pretty appealing if that's your theater...
How does this compare in scope and quality to traditional tracking networks (ground or space based)?
https://www.space.com/nasa-new-horizons-star-shift-parallax-...
https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/2017124903057838374
You basically have thousands of cameras taking constant images of the sky. If you could upgrade the cameras, you could deploy a continuous all-sky astronomical survey as a by-product.