A rocket ready for launch.
There could be tens of billions of spaceships in space, according to Musk, who has hit back at critics who said that his company's Starlink satellites are hogging too much space.
Musk said that space and satellites are very small. This is not a situation where we are effectively blocking others. We don't expect anyone to be blocked from doing anything.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Musk responded to a claim from the head of the European Space Agency that Musk was making the rules for the new commercial space economy. Aschbacher warned that Musk's rush to launch thousands of communications satellites would leave fewer radio frequencies and slots available for everyone else.
More than 2,000 satellites have been launched for the Starlink broadband communications network by the private space company.
Musk compared the number of satellites in low Earth orbit to what he said were 2 billion cars and trucks on Earth. He said that the Earth is larger than the planet's surface with an additional shell every 10 meters or so further out into space.
He said that it would mean room for tens of billions of satellites. A couple of thousand satellites is nothing. There are a couple of thousand cars on Earth.
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Some experts questioned Musk's claim that satellites could match the density of cars and trucks on Earth.
If a collision seems likely, spacecraft need far greater separation than cars do, said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He calculated that a three-second gap would leave room for about 1,000 satellites in each shell.
Changes in solar weather and the difficulty of calculating the trajectory of many different satellites make it difficult to identify potential collision.
He said that for many space users, planning an avoidance maneuver is at least hours if not days.
The Chinese space station was forced to take preventative collision avoidance control measures in October and July due to two Starlink satellites.
Laura Forczyk, a space analyst at space consulting group Astralytical, said that Musk was correct in saying that it was a traffic management problem.
She said that the race to launch new communications networks with thousands of satellites had revealed a glaring need for more coordination between countries to decide how orbital space is to be distributed and space traffic to be managed.
Aschbacher's criticism of Starlink was based on emotion.
I wonder if similar complaints were made when certain airlines started flying more planes. She said that no one owns the skies and that everyone is free to use them.
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