There’s around 15 000 satellites in orbit. Imagine there was only 15K cars on earth, and they could drive everywhere at random. How long do you think it would be before you even saw one, let alone there was a collision. Now imagine the area is much bigger, has an extra spacial dimension, and is being tracked and controlled.
Edit. There is, on average, a similar number of planes in the air as satellites, and mid-air collisions are extremely rare and usually only happen at choke-points like airports.
Planes are a good analogy. Pull up any flight tracker map, and zoomed out it’s like the sky is full of planes. How can they miss each other? But then you zoom into a scale that makes more sense, and realize that usually there’s lots of room in three dimensions between them all, with ones going different directions being at different altitudes to be able to cross paths when they do.
There’s around 15 000 satellites in orbit. Imagine there was only 15K cars on earth, and they could drive everywhere at random. How long do you think it would be before you even saw one, let alone there was a collision. Now imagine the area is much bigger, has an extra spacial dimension, and is being tracked and controlled.
Edit. There is, on average, a similar number of planes in the air as satellites, and mid-air collisions are extremely rare and usually only happen at choke-points like airports.
Planes are a good analogy. Pull up any flight tracker map, and zoomed out it’s like the sky is full of planes. How can they miss each other? But then you zoom into a scale that makes more sense, and realize that usually there’s lots of room in three dimensions between them all, with ones going different directions being at different altitudes to be able to cross paths when they do.