One of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites just had an uncomfortably close call in low Earth orbit—after a spacecraft deployed from a recent Chinese launch passed within a few hundred meters, SpaceX says.
The incident involves a payload released from a CAS Space Kinetica 1 rocket that lifted off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on Dec. 9 (U.S. time) / Dec. 10 (China time) carrying nine satellites.
SpaceX: 200 meters at ~560 km altitude
Michael Nicolls, SpaceX’s vice president of Starlink engineering, said on X that SpaceX saw “no coordination or deconfliction” and that the event resulted in a ~200-meter close approach involving STARLINK-6079 (56120) at about 560 kilometers altitude.
Nicolls didn’t identify which of the nine newly deployed spacecraft came closest.
CAS Space responds
CAS Space, the launch services provider behind Kinetica 1, replied on X that it uses ground-based space situational awareness to select launch windows and avoid known satellites and debris. The company said it was seeking more details and would assist in investigating what happened.
CAS Space also suggested the close approach—if confirmed—occurred roughly 48 hours after payload separation, when the launch mission itself had already concluded, and called for renewed coordination between “New Space” ecosystems.
What launched on Kinetica 1
China’s state media reported the mission carried six Chinese multifunctional satellites, plus an Earth-observation satellite for the UAE, a scientific satellite for Egypt, and an educational satellite for Nepal.
Why this kind of incident is getting harder to avoid
Close-approach events are becoming more common as low Earth orbit fills up. Starlink is a major driver of that growth: Space.com reports the constellation now includes more than 10,000 satellites launched, with 9,100+ operational.
And the pace isn’t slowing. SpaceX recently launched its 3,000th Starlink satellite of 2025, underscoring how quickly the network is expanding.
Starlink’s collision-avoidance system is busy—very busy
SpaceX says Starlink satellites can maneuver autonomously based on conjunction predictions, and regulatory reporting shows just how frequent those course-corrections have become. In the six months ending May 2025, Starlink satellites performed 144,404 conjunction-risk mitigation maneuvers—an eye-popping figure that works out to millions of tracking and decision points across the fleet.
The worry, as Nicolls framed it, is that coordination breaks down when operators don’t share trajectory/ephemeris data or when tracking inputs are incomplete. Even one collision can generate debris that raises the risk of further collisions—the core fear behind the “Kessler syndrome” scenario.