An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09643This paper paints a pretty grim picture of how fragile our situation in Low Earth Orbit has become, arguing that the whole orbital house of cards is one bad day away from collapsing. The authors introduce a new metric called the CRASH Clock which estimates how long it would take for a major collision to happen if we suddenly stopped doing active avoidance maneuvers. Back in 2018 that clock sat at a comfortable 121 days, meaning we had months of buffer if things went wrong. As of June 2025 that number has plummeted to just 2.8 days. That is a terrifyingly thin margin because it implies that if a massive solar storm knocked out communications or tracking for just a weekend we’d be looking at a 30% chance of a catastrophic collision. ... read full post
