There’s nothing Elon Musk loves more than sending Starlink satellites to space. Except maybe money and bad tweets. He’s just filed to send a million up there. Yep! A million.

Which doesn’t sit well with Donald Kessler, the man who first theorized the Kessler Syndrome in 1978. You see, Kessler and others think roughly 70,000 objects in LEO is the threshold beyond which collision cascades become self-sustaining and unstoppable, regardless of whether new launches cease entirely.

That’s a lot less than one million. What does science say? And is anyone clearing up all the junk we’ve already sent up to space?

We're reading Space To Grow by Matthew Weinzierl and Brendan Rosseau, to find out. This is Part 4.

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Timestamps

(00:00) How 150,000 pieces of space junk ended up in orbit and why nobody cleaned them up

(06:21) Kessler syndrome explained: the tipping point where collisions become unstoppable

(10:57) Why the insurance market is not pricing orbital collision risk

(13:50) Government intervention, the Moon Treaty and the five-year deorbit rule

(20:26) Active debris removal: magnets, robots and who is building the solutions

(22:37) Astroscale: how one company is trying to clean up space junk commercially

(24:53) Who pays to clean up orbit when the market has no incentive to

(26:26) Is SpaceX a monopoly and does that matter for the space industry

(29:08) NASA Administrator: there is only one thing worse than a government monopoly

(33:04) Space governance, coordination and whether the tragedy of the commons can be solved in orbit