China has called on the United Nations to remind the United States to abide by the Outer Space Treaty after Elon Musk's SpaceX satellites nearly collided with a Chinese space station twice in the past year, according to The Guardian.
China's National Space Administration has said that the Tiangun Station was forced twice - in July and October 2021 - to resort to emergency maneuvers to avoid collisions with Starlink satellites. Beijing presented a report to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.
In the report, Beijing asked UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to remind signatories to the Outer Space Treaty that they must "bear international responsibility" for national space activities by both governmental and non-governmental organizations.
"China would like the UN Secretary-General to disseminate the above information to all space treaty countries," the document said.
According to Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics expert Jonathan McDowell, space collisions are not uncommon, but the number of such incidents has increased in recent years due to the number of satellite launches, including Starlink satellites.
By the way, McDowell considers China's complaint through a "newsletter" to be "extremely unusual," adding that the country's space activities have also generated large amounts of space debris.
"It is fair to say that in the last 10 years, the US space station has had to avoid the wreckage of the Chinese military anti-satellite test in 2007 over the past 10 years," McDowell told The Guardian.
According to the American astrophysicist, the incident is another sign of the "new era in space".
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