A Starlink satellite came within about 200 meters of a Chinese spacecraft in low Earth orbit, last week, in what experts describe as a potentially dangerous near-miss at an altitude of roughly 560 kilometers.
The collision almost came as China’s Jiquan launch resulted in nine new satellites, one of which came within 200m of a Starlink satellite (STARLINK-6079) at an altitude of 560km, according to Michael Nicolls, the vice president of Starlink Engineering. Nicolls didn't attribute this to bad luck, but rather to failures in pre-launch coordination and data sharing.
"As far as we know, no coordination or deconfliction with existing satellites operating in space was performed," Nicolls said in a post on X, which, like Starlink, is owned by Elon Musk. "Most of the risk of operating in space comes from the lack of coordination between satellite operators - this needs to change."
The severity of the situation is underscored by the fact that at an orbital speed of roughly 7.8 km/s, a 200m gap is extremely narrow, with a high risk of collision and the potential for dangerous debris to fly in its wake.
“Indeed, if this isn’t solved, the potential of dire consequences will continue to increase until we’re not so lucky anymore and the worst-case scenario becomes a reality,” entrepreneur and X influencer Adrian Dittmann said in reply to Nicolls' post.
When satellite operators do not share ephemeris for their satellites, dangerously close approaches can occur in space. A few days ago, 9 satellites were deployed from a launch from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Northwestern China. As far as we know, no coordination or…
undefined Michael Nicolls (@michaelnicollsx) December 13, 2025
Another respondent, Steve Scrase, apportioned blame on both sides by saying, “SpaceX is placing satellites in orbit wherever it chooses and with no regard to any other country. Both SpaceX and China are as bad as each other.”
While this kind of blame may gladly fuel the space race narrative, there’s also the idea that nations (like China) may withhold the space coordinates (called ephemeris data) due to national security interests or lack of enforced mandates.
As Youssef El Manssouri pointed out, “Sharing ephemeris should be normal, not optional. If you want to be in orbit, you should have to coordinate.”
The core hurdle here appears to be political trust, rather than technical capability.
Within the Earth's orbit, there are currently just under 9000 recorded satellites (and rapidly expanding), as well as an estimated 22,000 pieces of debris. “Almost crashes” are very common, although major crashes are rare.
One such example of a major crash in the past was the 2009 hypervelocity crash between an active US communications satellite and a defunct Russian satellite. That caused over 1,800 large tracked debris fragments.
Since the 2009 crash, the number of active satellites has more than quadrupled, thanks to mega-constellations such as Starlink.
Starlink currently occupies around 66% of the satellites in low Earth orbit, as space congestion increases and exacerbates the situation further.
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