A "House of Cards" is a wonderful English phrase that it seems is now primarily associated with a Netflix political drama. However, its original meaning is of a system that is fundamentally unstable. It's also the term Sarah Thiele, originally a Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia, and now at Princeton, and her co-authors used to describe our current satellite mega-constellation system in a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv.
They are all in LEO, so they would naturally de-orbit in a matter weeks uncontrolled so, who cares?
Kessler Syndrome is cool Sci-fi, but not really possible to stop us from leaving earth. There is a very narrow band where the debris could accumulate (LEO), and as you get further away, the amount of space increases by a cube of the altitude, not to mention that only the “cheapest” low earth orbits would be affected. Things like polar orbits or sun-synchronous orbits aren’t affected. The band of debris only hinders stable orbits at that level, i.e. LEO satellites such as starlink constellations would be affected but it doesn’t act as an impenetrable barrier. It also doesn’t affect useful satellites like GPS.
Basically the problem described only affects the profits of a company that would be the primary cause of the problem. So in a way it’s self-correcting.
The Kessler stndrom isn’t sci-fi anymore, it’s a chain reaction which is more and more probable with the amount of fragments in orbita and not only in a narrow band, but covering the whole planet. And no, not affect only companies, it affects the whole satelite system, GPS, climate observation, space stations, communication, etc… hundreds of thousand fragments and old sats out of order and control, with speeds of 20-30 km/s are not a joke, not only for Starlink, also for all other satelites and stations.
https://platform.leolabs.space/visualization
You understand that not all satellites are in Low Earth Orbit right? And even those that are in LEO, not all of them are in the same orbital path. So even if all of Starlink satellites exploded and polluted their orbit with a worse case scenario, GPS wouldn’t be affected (GPS orbit is 20,000km away from Starlinks with hugely different Delta V required to interact with them). LEO Polar Orbits wouldn’t be affected, and any space faring nation would still be able to launch missions that avoid the polluted orbital area.
Kessler syndrome is a concern for “economical” space exploitation, but not actually an issue for a Government that cared and wanted to prevent it.
Do you have any sources on the worst case scenario outcomes? I had a write up I put together but should probably do some more reading before posting a 5 paragraph essay on the matter
I’m aware that not all objects are on the same hight, there are several layers, but currently all layers are saturated with sats, working or not and thousends of tons of debris of every kind. This is getting worst with every launch of new sats. In the page i posted you can see the current objects and their data in real time. Every possible crash, like the some month ago, the small object perforanting the Chinese space station, luckily with not big consequences, and similar which even destroyed some sats, augmented the amount of trash. A lot of abandoned sats out of control, like the one from Rusia make the situation not better. Also not a huge amount of sats not able to changing course to avoid a crash.
You cannot fill the sky with all kinds of objects ad infinitum, hoping that this will not have serious consequences in the long run, and we are already about to reach this limit. I don’t care about spy or large corporate satellites, starlink etc. but if they are destroyed they produce thousands of tons of garbage that further endangers essential satellites (GPS, Communications, Climate…) even more, avoiding any new launch , when the expression “launch window” takes on a literal meaning, making it a Frogger game.
Here an report from the ESA, maybe more convincing as my post
https://www.sdo.esoc.esa.int/environment_report/Space_Environment_Report_latest.pdf
This is not true. Only LEO at best is saturated. And Kessler syndrome in LEO would have zero effect on GEO or other orbits.