The Unpatched Satellite
A windowless ground control room in Darmstadt, Germany at 11:47 PM, where seventeen monitors are showing the same blinking red telemetry warning and a half-eaten döner kebab is going cold on the flight director's chair.
ESA's decommissioned Sentinel-4B Earth observation satellite has drifted into a lower orbit than expected and is now on a collision trajectory with an active Starlink cluster in 91 minutes. Ground control has one shot to fire the satellite's remaining 0.3 kilograms of hydrazine to nudge it clear — but the thruster firmware hasn't been updated since 2019, and the last three cold-fire attempts on similar birds ended in valve failures that turned controlled burns into uncontrolled tumbles. They can attempt the burn now, or let the conjunction play out and trust the 340-meter miss distance that NORAD's latest tracking update — posted eight minutes ago — is calling "low probability but non-negligible."
“We've got 0.3 kilos of go-juice and one shot — that's not a risk, that's a highlight reel. Fire the thruster before 340 meters becomes zero.”
“The firmware is five years stale and the last three valves failed, but sure, let's turn a maybe-miss into a definitely-tumbling debris piñata.”
They fired the thruster. The valve seized after 0.04 seconds, sending Sentinel-4B into a slow, majestic pirouette that sheared off its solar panel array and sprayed 347 pieces of trackable debris directly into the Starlink cluster's orbital plane — turning one low-probability conjunction into eleven confirmed ones and a phone call from SpaceX legal that lasted until dawn.
We turned a döner-sized problem into a debris field the size of Luxembourg, and he's tallying points.
Okay but technically the original satellite didn't hit anything, so I'm counting that as a partial win.