Stargaze: SpaceX's Space Situational Awareness System

Summary

Stargaze already has a proven track record in its utility for space safety. In late 2025, a Starlink satellite encountered a conjunction with a third-party satellite that was performing maneuvers, but whose operator was not sharing ephemeris. Until five hours before the conjunction, the close approach was anticipated to be ~9,000 meters—considered a safe miss-distance with zero probability of collision. With just five hours to go, the third-party satellite performed a maneuver which changed its trajectory and collapsed the anticipated miss distance to just ~60 meters. Stargaze quickly detected this maneuver and published an updated trajectory to the screening platform, generating new CDMs which were immediately distributed to relevant satellites. Ultimately, the Starlink satellite was able to react within an hour of the maneuver being detected, planning an avoidance maneuver to reduce collision risk back down to zero.With so little time to react, this would not have been possible by relying on legacy radar systems or high-latency conjunction screening processes. If observations of the third-party satellite were less frequent, conjunction screening took longer, or the reaction required human approval, such an event might not have been successfully mitigated.While Stargaze embodies a major improvement to the ability of any operator to fly safely, it is imperative for operators to frequently share ephemeris of their own fleets. This is particularly true for operators with maneuvering vehicles. While Stargaze can detect maneuvers more quickly than any other system in use today, the most definitive source of satellite trajectories should be provided by operators themselves, allowing deconfliction and minimizing collision avoidance maneuvers. Starlink ephemeris is updated and shared publicly every hour, and all other operators should do the same. An appropriate analogy is commercial aviation: there are hundreds of thousands of flights of aircraft daily, but they are able ...