Starlink satellites now perform 275 collision-avoidance maneuvers per day autonomously, but no international protocol governs how operators coordinate these maneuvers with each other

SpaceX's Starlink constellation performed 144,404 collision-avoidance maneuvers between December 2024 and May 2025, averaging roughly 275 per day. These maneuvers are executed autonomously by onboard AI without human intervention and without standardized coordination with other operators. ESA's Head of Space Safety Holger Krag has stated that 'collision avoidance depends entirely on the pragmatism of the operators involved' in the absence of traffic rules. When ESA's Aeolus satellite had a close approach with a Starlink satellite in 2019, ESA had to perform the avoidance maneuver because SpaceX's automated system did not act, and direct operator-to-operator communication was difficult. Why it matters: Autonomous collision avoidance without inter-operator coordination means two satellites could maneuver into each other while both trying to avoid a third object, so a collision between active satellites would generate thousands of debris fragments, so those fragments would trigger further collisions in a cascading Kessler-like chain reaction, so entire orbital shells could become unusable for decades, so critical infrastructure including weather forecasting, GPS augmentation, and global internet connectivity would be degraded or lost. The structural root cause is that there is no international body with binding authority to mandate collision-avoidance communication protocols between satellite operators -- the ITU governs spectrum but not orbital traffic, the UN COPUOS produces non-binding guidelines, and the U.S. Space Force's 18th Space Defense Squadron provides conjunction warnings but has no authority over foreign operators -- so each operator independently decides its own collision thresholds, maneuver strategies, and communication practices.