With SpaceX, Musk's company, about to IPO, related stocks like Innolux (3481) are generating a lot of buzz. As thousands of artificial satellites are launched into orbit, the space environment around Earth is becoming increasingly precarious. A new research paper published in December 2025 proposes a new metric called CRASH Clock, revealing alarming data: if all human intervention ceases, a catastrophic collision could occur in low Earth orbit in less than three days.
The paper, titled "An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions," was co-authored by researchers from Princeton University, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Regina. The research team warns that human stress on the orbital environment has reached unprecedented levels, with extremely limited margin for error.
The CRASH clock has been reduced from 121 days to 2.8 days.
The study points out that the so-called "CRASH clock" is a metric used to measure the stress of the orbital environment, specifically defined as "the time required for a catastrophic collision to occur without any evasive maneuvers or loss of situational awareness." In layman's terms, without any human intervention, a low-Earth orbit satellite could experience a catastrophic collision within days.
Data shows that in 2018, before megaconstellations became widespread, the CRASH clock showed 121 days remaining. However, by 2025, with the rapid deployment of megaconstellations like SpaceX's Starlink, this number had plummeted to 2.8 days. This means that if an extreme solar storm causes satellites to go out of control or communications to be disrupted, we would have almost no time to deal with the resulting cascading collision risks.
Current low-Earth orbit satellites rely on human intervention to avoid collisions.
The authors of the paper describe the current orbital environment as a House of Cards. Currently, orbital safety relies entirely on frequent and precise collision avoidance maneuvers by operators.
Data from the study indicates that at the 550-kilometer orbital altitude, where Starlink satellites are most densely packed, a close encounter of less than 1 kilometer occurs on average every 11 minutes. The risk of a collision could quickly materialize should the avoidance system fail due to software malfunctions or solar storms.
The study specifically cited the intense geomagnetic storm of May 2024 as a warning. At that time, due to a sharp increase in atmospheric drag and to avoid collisions, more than half of the active satellites (primarily Starlink) were forced to maneuver. In such chaotic conditions, the uncertainty in satellite positions could reach several kilometers, making collision avoidance operations extremely difficult. If an even stronger solar storm (such as the Carrington event of 1859) were to occur, the consequences could be disastrous.
Scholars urge: To face up to the risks of low-Earth orbit satellites
The research team emphasized that the shortening of the CRASH clock does not directly represent the full-blown "Kessler Syndrome" (i.e., a chain reaction of debris impacts rendering the orbit unusable), but it clearly demonstrates that our reliance on zero-error human intervention has reached a dangerous level.
The author urges that this vulnerability must be addressed for the sustainable development of space. Instead of simply calculating how many more satellites can be crammed into orbit, the focus should shift to monitoring the health and resilience of the orbit to prevent this orbital house of cards from collapsing in the next solar storm.
This article, "Low-Earth Orbit Satellite House of Cards: If Musk's Starlink malfunctions, could there be a global satellite collision within 3 days?", first appeared on ABMedia .
