SpaceX’s Starlink constellation now performs more than 355,000 collision avoidance maneuvers per year, meaning the average satellite in the megaconstellation dodges a potential collision nearly every week. The figures, drawn from SpaceX’s semiannual Federal Communications Commission report, have sparked renewed warnings from space safety experts that the orbital environment is approaching a breaking point.
Between December 2025 and May 2026, Starlink satellites executed 207,152 collision avoidance maneuvers, up nearly 60,000 from the 148,696 recorded in the previous six-month period. That half-year total alone exceeds the number of maneuvers performed in all of 2024 by a factor of three.
SpaceX’s constellation has grown from roughly 6,000 satellites in 2024 to more than 10,000 as of June 2026, driving a corresponding surge in total operational spacecraft in low Earth orbit from approximately 10,000 to roughly 16,000 over the same period.
Each Starlink satellite operates in orbit at altitudes between 480 and 550 kilometers (298 to 342 miles). Its autonomous collision avoidance system triggers whenever the probability of a conjunction exceeds 3 in 10 million. Over the past year, the average satellite performed more than 40 such maneuvers.
“I think we’re heading towards a situation where there will be a collision involving an operational satellite in the constellation,” said Hugh Lewis, a space sustainability expert at the University of Birmingham in the UK. “And it will not be for the lack of trying to avoid those things. It will be in spite of all those maneuvers.”
Lewis pointed to the mathematics of residual risk: each avoidance maneuver reduces the probability of collision to roughly 1 in 1 million, a level widely regarded as negligible. But with hundreds of thousands of maneuvers annually, that negligible risk accumulates into a serious concern across the entire fleet.
“The avoidance maneuvers reduce the probability of a collision to about one in a million, which is so small that it’s negligible,” Lewis said. “The problem is that if you make a million maneuvers and you have a residual probability of one in a million, you end up with an aggregate risk across your entire constellation that you can’t get rid of.”
The number of collision avoidance maneuvers is rising faster than the satellite count itself. Tommaso Sgobba, director of the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety, explained that adding satellites does not increase risk linearly.
“The more satellites you pack into an orbital shell, the more pairs of satellites exist that could potentially cross paths,” Sgobba said. “Adding satellites does not just add risk one unit at a time, it multiplies the number of possible pairings. Double the satellites in a shell and you roughly quadruple the number of pairs that need to be watched.”
Sgobba also warned that current collision warning systems are not well equipped for the density of modern megaconstellations, leading to unnecessary fuel consumption and shortened satellite lifespans.
“Operators lack tools to tell a real threat from statistical confusion,” he said. “Satellites are frequently dodging ghosts, burning fuel and shortening their operational lives in the process.”
The regulatory framework has not kept pace. Sgobba noted that operators are not required to disclose how many maneuvers a proposed constellation will need, nor whether their satellites carry sufficient fuel and automation to carry them out.
“Right now, there is no clear requirement for a company to say, before launch, how many collision avoidance maneuvers a constellation of this size and density will need every year and whether the satellites carry enough fuel and automation to actually perform them all,” he said.
The trajectory ahead is steep. SpaceX has applied to the FCC to expand Starlink to as many as 100,000 satellites. At the current rate of growth, the company will have performed 1 million cumulative avoidance maneuvers as early as June 2027. By 2030, the constellation alone may be executing more than 1 million maneuvers per year, at which point the residual 1-in-1-million risk per maneuver becomes a significant aggregate concern across the fleet.
Other operators are also moving into similar orbital altitudes. Amazon’s Project Kuiper and China’s Qianfan (Thousand Sails) constellation are both deploying to low Earth orbit, compounding the crowding problem.
“The safe thing to do is to separate the constellations,” Lewis said. “But then you are talking about orbital carrying capacity and the first mover benefit, because if I go into a particular altitude with my constellation, then nobody else can use it.”
Sgobba called on regulators to treat orbital crowding as an engineering problem that can be measured and managed, rather than reacting after incidents occur.
“Regulators should be treating this as a manageable, predictable engineering workload, by asking for these numbers up front rather than reacting to headlines about near misses after the fact,” he said.
By Clark — 2026-07-15