The tech billionaire’s SpaceX satellites are catching heat in the country after Beijing complained that two satellites launched by the American aerospace manufacturer endangered Chinese astronauts.
The two encounters “constituted dangers to the life or health of astronauts aboard the China Space Station,” according to the report, which said the incidents happened in July and October.
China filed its complaint to the UN early this month. But the episodes didn’t gain widespread attention in the country until this week.
Asked about the incident on Tuesday, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs called on the United States to “take immediate measures to prevent such incidents from happening again.”
“It is a typical double standard for the US to proclaim the concept of ‘responsible conduct in outer space’ while ignoring its obligations under international treaties on outer space and posing a grave threat to the lives and safety of astronauts,” Zhao Lijian told reporters.
SpaceX did not respond to a request from CNN Business for comment about the document that China filed with the UN, nor to questions about whether the company was able to communicate with Chinese authorities during the incidents.
The UN’s Office for Outer Space Affairs did not immediately respond to a request from CNN Business for comment. In its report, China asked UN Secretary-General António Guterres to remind countries of the organization’s treaty governing outer space activity.
The US military’s Vandenberg Space Force Base, which monitors space traffic and attempts to track potential collisions, did not respond to a request for comment about the UNOOSA report.
A space traffic problem
SpaceX’s Starlink constellation already includes roughly 2,000 satellites, and it promises to far surpass that amount.
Near-misses between objects in space happen all the time. And the apparent close calls documented in China’s report to the UN may be symptoms of a larger problem plaguing space-faring nations: There is not a perfect, international solution for tracking and coordinating objects in space.
Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, pointed out that the International Space Station has had to maneuver out of the way of debris created by China’s 2007 ASAT test several times in recent years.
In other words: Every party involved shares a bit of the fault for how crowded Earth’s orbit has become.
“This is another symptom that we’re in a new era — a new space age that is both much busier much tenser,” McDowell told CNN Business.
It’s not clear whether the Starlink satellites mentioned in the UN report attempted to move out of the way of China’s space station on their own. During October’s close encounter, according to China, the satellite’s “maneuver strategy was unknown and orbital errors were hard to be assessed,” prompting the space station to evade the satellite and “avoid a potential collision.”
McDowell told CNN Business that based on his data, the Starlink satellite that made a close approach to China’s space station in July made a slight adjustment to its path that could indicate the autonomous system was working.
But he added that those systems are hardly effective if there’s not more coordination.
“If I’m in China — even if I know that SpaceX has an autonomous system — I don’t know that it’s going to work this time,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s switched on.”
Musk’s reputation in China
The controversy could hurt Musk’s reputation in China.
Musk spent years winning over authorities and Chinese citizens alike as his electric carmaker Tesla made inroads where other foreign firms could not.
— CNN’s Beijing bureau contributed to this report.