On December 15th, Michael Nichols, Vice President of Starlink Engineering at SpaceX, posted on social media that dangerous close range approaches may occur in space when satellite operators do not share satellite ephemeris. A few days ago, 9 satellites were launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China.
However, this satellite launch did not coordinate or eliminate conflicts with existing space satellites, resulting in a close approach of 200 meters between a deployed satellite and STARLINK-6079 (56120) at an orbital altitude of 560 kilometers.
This statement was immediately countered by the aforementioned launch service provider, Zhongke Aerospace. Zhongke Aerospace stated on social media that all its launch missions will use ground space sensing systems to select launch windows to avoid collisions with known satellites or debris, emphasizing that this is a mandatory procedure.
Subsequently, Zhongke Aerospace further stated that if (close contact) is confirmed, the event occurred nearly 48 hours after the separation of the payload, by which time the launch mission had already ended.
It is understood that Starlink, as SpaceX's global satellite communication system, currently operates nearly 9000 Starlink satellites in orbit, and the total number of launches has already exceeded 10000.
Aerospace experts have introduced to the media that in order to fully utilize the carrying capacity of Falcon 9, SpaceX will first launch the Starlink satellite into a particularly low orbit when launching it.
Afterwards, these satellites rely on electric propulsion to lift themselves to the appropriate orbital altitude; When the satellite encounters problems and is no longer in use, it should actively deorbit. Based on this, the ascent and descent operations of the "Starlink" satellite are very frequent.
Another report shows that from December 2024 to the end of May 2025, the "Starlink" satellite performed over 140000 orbital maneuvers to avoid "collisions" in space.
In addition, as early as 2021, SpaceX's "Starlink" satellite approached the Chinese space station twice, posing a threat to the lives and health of astronauts on the Chinese space station. Therefore, China's space station implemented two preventive collision avoidance controls, namely emergency collision avoidance.
