SpaceX's call for orbital coordination is a reasonable-sounding ask from the party that benefits most from it. The company told US regulators its Starlink fleet pulled off roughly 50,000 collision-avoidance maneuvers in six months, about 275 a day, with some conjunctions reported in the tens of meters. That is not an operator struggling to keep up with traffic. That is the traffic. When you own more than 8,000 of the active satellites in low Earth orbit, your requests for shared data stop being neutral. My verdict: the burden runs the other way. SpaceX, not the smaller fleets, should move first, publish first, and absorb the cost of the system it made necessary.
Michael Nicolls, Starlink's engineering chief, has asked other operators to share ephemeris data and coordinate maneuvers. From the seat of a smaller fleet, that reads as a one-way street: hand over your precise orbital positions, then accept whatever maneuvers the dominant constellation chooses. Amazon has built satellite number 1,000 for Project Kuiper with roughly 100 actually flying. Its FCC license wants 1,618 in orbit by July 2026. Launch cadence is Kuiper's real constraint, not goodwill. Still, why should a fleet that has flown a fraction of Starlink's total be first to open its books to the company setting the terms? Complying first is a tax on being small.
No one owns low Earth orbit traffic control. The ITU hands out spectrum, the FCC licenses constellations, and Space Force's 18th Space Defense Squadron screens conjunctions and emails warnings. The maneuver decision belongs to each operator, and nothing assigns fault when two objects close at 7.5 kilometers per second. A 20-meter miss breaks no rule because no rule exists. Shared ephemeris standards and altitude bands would fix most of this, and they only work if the largest constellation adopts them without waiting for anyone else. That is the test. If coordination means smaller operators defer to the fleet that created the congestion, the word is doing a lot of unearned work.