Open Source Mega-Constellations Could Solve Overcrowding

Duplicating expensive resources is expensive and wasteful, and most people would agree it’s unnecessary. However, the planned increase in major satellite constellations is currently causing a massive duplication of resources as individual companies and even countries try to set up their own infrastructure in space. What’s more, there is a relatively limited amount of space in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), where many of these satellites are supposed to go – any more than that and a single collision could cause Kessler Syndrome, where many of the ones already in orbit would be destroyed and we wouldn’t be able to launch any more for a long time. A new paper from researchers at the National University of Defense Technology in China suggests an alternative to these multiple megaconstellations – a single, modular system similar to how cloud computing works on the current internet.