A new study warns that if satellite operators suddenly lose control during a major disruption, a catastrophic collision in orbit could happen in as little as 2.8 days.

A major solar storm does not need to smash satellites apart directly to create a crisis in orbit. It may only need to interrupt the tracking, commands, and avoidance maneuvers that keep today’s crowded satellite environment under control.

That risk is growing as low Earth orbit fills with mega constellations, large networks of satellites launched and replaced in rapid cycles. These spacecraft support internet access, communications, weather monitoring, navigation, and other services. However, they also add congestion to an orbital region where objects travel at roughly 17,000 miles per hour (27,000 kilometers per hour).

A new paper led by Sarah Thiele, who began the work as a PhD student at the University of British Columbia and is now at Princeton, attempts to measure how fragile this system has become. The study introduces a metric called the Collision Realization And Significant Harm (CRASH) Clock, which estimates how long it could take for a serious collision to occur if satellites could no longer maneuver or if operators lost reliable awareness of where objects were.

The result is alarming. Using satellite catalog data from June 2025, the researchers calculated that if operators lost the ability to send commands for avoidance maneuvers, a catastrophic collision could occur in around 2.8 days. A broader version of the CRASH Clock, based on all resident space object interactions, was 5.5 days. Back in 2018, before the rapid expansion of mega constellations, that value was 164 days.

Solar storms as a systemic threat

Satellites in low Earth orbit do not simply coast along fixed paths. They depend on station keeping, tracking updates, and collision avoidance maneuvers. According to SpaceX’s most recent biannual report cited in the study, Starlink satellites performed 144,404 collision avoidance maneuvers between December 1, 2024, and May 31, 2025. That averages 41 maneuvers per satellite per year, or one avoidance maneuver every 1.8 minutes across the Starlink network.

During a major solar storm, this carefully managed system can become harder to control. Solar storms heat Earth’s upper atmosphere, causing it to expand. That increases drag on satellites, pulls spacecraft away from predicted paths, forces operators to use fuel to maintain altitude, and makes orbit forecasts less reliable.

The May 2024 “Gannon Storm” showed how disruptive this can be. Nearly half of all active satellites in low Earth orbit maneuvered because of increased atmospheric drag. The study notes that widespread repositioning, combined with unpredictable drag, made collision assessment during and after the storm much harder.

The danger grows if a storm also disrupts navigation, communications, or ground control. In that case, satellites may be harder to track just as they become less able to respond.

Why one collision matters

Kessler syndrome is the most well-known version of this kind of catastrophe, where cascading collisions fill orbit with debris and eventually make it extremely difficult to safely launch or operate spacecraft. But that runaway scenario would take years or decades to fully unfold.

To highlight the much more immediate danger, the researchers introduced a new metric called the Collision Realization and Significant Harm (CRASH) Clock, which estimates how quickly a major, debris-generating collision could become possible if active satellite control and coordination were disrupted.

Even one high-speed impact can have lasting consequences. A collision between large objects can create thousands of fragments, each becoming another hazard. Today’s debris environment is still shaped by China’s 2007 anti-satellite test involving Fengyun 1C and the 2009 collision between Iridium 33 and Kosmos 2251.

The new study finds that the densest parts of today’s satellite networks are now especially concerning. Starlink’s main shell, around 550 kilometers (342 miles) above Earth, reaches densities more than an order of magnitude higher than the peak in tracked debris near 800 kilometers (497 miles).

A shrinking margin for error

The researchers estimate that across all of low Earth orbit, close approaches within 1 kilometer (0.62 miles) occur every 36 seconds. Encounters involving at least one satellite occur about every 41 seconds, while those involving Starlink and another resident space object occur about every 47 seconds.

A close approach is not the same as a collision. Operators weigh distance, uncertainty, object size, and collision probability before deciding whether to move a satellite. Still, the frequency of these encounters shows how dependent orbit has become on fast, accurate, coordinated control.

Major solar storms are rare, but they are not hypothetical. The May 2024 Gannon Storm was the strongest geomagnetic storm in decades. The Carrington Event of September 1859 was at least twice as intense, according to the paper, and included two strong storms within a few days.

If a Carrington-scale storm occurred today, it would hit a world that relies heavily on satellites for communications, timing, Earth observation, weather forecasting, military operations, disaster response, finance, and navigation. It would also strike an orbital environment far more crowded than it was even a decade ago.

Beyond collision risk, mega constellations also contribute to debris, reentry hazards, interference with astronomy, and atmospheric pollution.

The study does not call for eliminating satellites, but it highlights a critical vulnerability. Low Earth orbit now relies on constant, precise control, and if that control is disrupted, the window to prevent a major collision could be just days.

Reference: “An orbital house of cards: Frequent megaconstellation close conjunctions” by Sarah Thiele, Skye R. Heiland, Aaron C. Boley and Samantha M. Lawler, 10 December 2025, arXiv.
DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2512.09643

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Storin spoke with The Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute’s Megan Graham about how the company is trying to keep up in the quickly changing space. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

WSJLI: I just asked our company’s Gemini who we should use for video business software. The reply listed Zoom first, saying it’s the “industry standard”—so, good job on that. It’s interesting to see its explanation for why that is, and what kind of information it cites, including Gartner rankings and other factors. I’m sure you’re thinking about all of these things constantly.

Kim Storin: All day long. And are we getting pulled into the right things, do we have the FAQs built into every single page that they need to be, so that the LLMs are pulling the right information? It’s a whole new world.

We have 99% brand awareness, so we don’t have a brand awareness problem. We do have a perception challenge, because video is fairly commoditized at this point. What Zoom has done to grow is to build and to buy across other workflows. So we have a product for job recruiters, for example, and a contact center for customer support, so if your vacuum breaks and you’re calling SharkNinja, they’re using Zoom. We have a phone platform for small businesses. We have webinars and events for marketers.

With our answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization efforts, we know that we’re showing up and we’ve got all the right citations when it comes to videoconferencing. But how are we showing up for our contact center business? How are we showing up in webinars against our competition? Are we capturing the rest of this growth in the market that we have to in order to continue to grow outside of just a commoditized video space?

WSJLI: When did you start to think about this as a CMO?

Storin: I think it was last fall where we started. It had been a conversation before that, but I remember being at an event in September where I sat down with the CMO of software review website G2, which had just gotten this really hot, fresh data showing that the number of people starting their discovery on LLMs had shot up quickly.

It was that moment where I’m like, holy smokes, in three months that number has shot up and we can’t be passively thinking that this is all going to align. And we can’t keep thinking that our SEO team understands what it takes for AEO and GEO in the same way that they’re experts in SEO. It’s interconnected, but it’s way bigger.

That was when we really kicked off our efforts in earnest, where I set up a SWAT team. SEO has to play a role. But so does content, so does our web team, so does our data team, so does our brand and media team. It’s so complex. How are we changing the way that we’re building content?

WSJLI: How does the SWAT team work?

Storin: We have a weekly core team meeting treating this like any other cross-functional effort. We’re standing up an agile marketing approach, but for something that’s not a campaign. It’s fundamentally how we do work, how we market.

WSJLI: How does your business-to-business focus make optimizing for LLMs different than it might be for companies trying to appeal to consumers?

Storin: B-to-b buyers don’t want to talk to a salesperson for most of their journey. That’s a big change. They’re not sitting down with 15 vendors and getting to know the vendors. They’re spending 80% of that time researching, talking to ChatGPT, talking to their friends, getting referrals, researching online, and then you only get that meeting if you’re shortlisted. Now, our goal is to get on that shortlist.

WSJLI: How are you thinking about how the LLMs pick up conversations about Zoom on these various platforms like Reddit? 

Storin: It is authenticity that is getting pulled through, driving engagement. It’s vulnerability.

One report came out recently that said LinkedIn is number one in terms of LLM citing. Well, that changes your whole strategy, because it’s not brands that are getting picked up. Your executives are being cited as part of this. Reddit is also up there, and Substack. And then, obviously, press releases matter again, in a way that they didn’t matter as much two years ago.

So now it’s like, how do you convince your executive team that they need to be active on LinkedIn? How do you convince your team to get back on board after we’ve been trying to tell them fewer press releases? Not only do we need press releases, but they need to be press releases specifically designed for LLM pickup. It’s a totally different approach. 

WSJLI: How are you staying on top of it?

Storin: Nobody can be on top of it. I think it’s one of those things that is just evolving every single day. People are surprised when I say that we don’t have it all figured out.

I launched a GPU-accelerated server in 2015 and so I’ve been living in this machine-learning, deep-learning space for more than 10 years now. What I learned back then is what I’m seeing now, which is that if you don’t build some kind of cross-functional core competency in-house, you will not be able to actually see results that are driving outcomes at scale.

We’re basically taking that same approach. In our organization, they have to be curious, they have to be agile, and they have to take calculated risks. It’s more of a culture shift than it is an expertise shift at this point.

Ask, “Why are Americans so obese?” and you’ll get the same two lazy answers: “too much food” and “not enough exercise.”
Public‑health sites dress this up with jargon about “energy imbalance” and “sedentary lifestyles,” but it all comes down to “eat less, move more.”

This is wrong in two important ways. It’s wrong historically, and it’s wrong biologically.

Historically, the rise in obesity is too fast and too recent to be explained by a gentle drift toward gluttony and laziness. In 1990, U.S. adult obesity was in the teens; today it’s over 40 percent. We did not triple our manual labor, then suddenly stop. We did not suddenly forget how to push away from the table. The environment changed in a particular way, and our bodies responded in a particular way.

Biologically, the “calorie is a calorie” story misses the point. Your fat tissue isn’t a passive savings account. It is an active organ that evolved to defend you from famine and winter. The question is not “how many calories did you eat?” The question is, “what signals did you give your body about whether to store fat or burn it?”

For mammals, one signal has always been louder than the rest: sweet.

Sweet as a survival signal

Imagine you’re a mammal in the wild. For most of the year, food is hard to find. Then autumn arrives and something strange happens: fruit. Sweetness appears, briefly, right before winter, when starvation is most likely.

In that environment, it is a feature—not a bug—that sweet things drive you to eat more and store more. The animals that could turn “sweet” into “fat” most efficiently were the animals that survived winter and got to reproduce.

We are the descendants of those champion fat‑storers. We still carry that wiring. The difference is that winter never comes.

Modern food culture has taken that ancient survival signal—sweetness—and piped it into every corner of daily life, especially in liquid form and especially in the morning, when your metabolism is most primed to take instructions for the day. That isn’t just “extra calories.” It’s a chronic “winter is coming” alarm, blaring all day, every day.

Why liquids are different

For almost all of mammalian evolution, adults consumed one liquid: water. You drank water and you chewed food. There was no such thing as a constant IV line of pre‑digested sugar flowing straight into your gut.

Sweet liquids break that pattern in several ways:

• They are pre‑chewed. There’s little mechanical or digestive work. Sugar rushes into the bloodstream quickly and in large amounts.

• They bypass a lot of the satiety machinery. You don’t “register” those calories the way you do solid food, so you don’t reliably eat less later.

• They are metabolically noisy. Fructose in particular is handled largely by the liver, where it can be rapidly converted to fat and can nudge the body toward fat storage mode.

In evolutionary terms, a big hit of liquid sweetness says: “Fruit everywhere. Winter right behind it. Eat now, store now, ask questions later.”

That’s a clever trick of biology in an orchard. It’s a metabolic disaster in a world where the orchard never closes.

The Starbucks problem

If you want to see this disaster in real time, do not go to a fast‑food burger chain. Go to your neighborhood coffee chain at 7:30 a.m.

In Paris and Rome, the morning ritual is simple: coffee, perhaps with a small pastry, and plenty of people just drinking coffee and getting on with their day. In the United States, we turned the morning coffee into a dessert course.

Look at the menu boards: “Caramel Ribbon Crunch Frappuccino,” “Mocha Cookie Crumble,” whatever the seasonal candy‑bar‑in‑a‑cup is this week. Many of these drinks deliver the sugar load of a large soda, plus fat, plus the illusion of virtue that comes with the word “coffee.”

And crucially, we drink them at breakfast.

That’s not a snack competing with lunch. That is the beginning of the metabolic day being programmed by a huge dose of liquid sugar and fat. It is the modern version of gorging on fruit at the end of autumn—only now autumn is 365 days a year, and the “trees” are open late and have drive‑throughs.

We talk endlessly about “fast food” as if the big story is burgers and fries. But a drive‑through chain that sells mostly liquid sugar and fat to millions of people before 9 a.m. every day is a fast‑food chain. It just smells like coffee instead of French fries.

The fattest place in America might not be the burger joint. It might be the morning coffee drive‑through.

Why exercise doesn’t save us

This is where the “exercise myth” comes in. The problem is not that exercise is useless. The problem is that we’ve tried to use it against the wrong enemy.

Exercise does remarkable things: it improves mood, preserves muscle, protects the heart, keeps the brain sharp, and helps people keep weight off once it’s lost. But it is a terrible match for a culture that tells people they can drink a liquid dessert every morning and burn it off on a bike.

On paper, you can do the math: a 500‑calorie drink, a 500‑calorie workout, no harm done. In reality:

• Workouts burn less than we think and stimulate more appetite than we admit.

• The body compensates for increased training by burning fewer calories elsewhere.

• Most people cannot or will not sustain the volume of exercise required to offset a chronic flood of sweetened liquids and ultra‑processed “feed.”

Telling people to “just move more” in this environment is like telling them to “just breathe harder” while we quietly pump the room full of smoke. The problem isn’t their lungs. It’s the smoke.

Food vs. feed

Here’s the second half of the story. It’s not just that we’ve added sweet liquids; it’s that we’ve rebuilt the rest of the food supply around cheap industrial inputs designed to fatten animals—corn, soy, refined starches, and seed oils—and then fed them back to ourselves as “food products.”

Cattle, hogs, and chickens are deliberately overfed on high‑energy corn and soy mixtures to reach slaughter weight quickly. We then take the same raw materials, run them through factories, and create brightly packaged, hyper‑palatable products for humans, many of which are designed to be eaten with the very sweet drinks we just talked about.

We are not just eating more. We are being fattened.

Not because anyone sat down and twirled their mustache about obesity, but because the cheapest way to make shelf‑stable, craveable, high‑margin products is to use corn and soy derivatives, sugar, and industrial fats—exactly the same things we use to bulk up livestock.

If you look at the American waistline and then look at the American food‑industrial system, you see the same logic: maximum weight gain per unit cost.

A different way to frame obesity

When you put this together, the obesity epidemic stops looking like millions of people who failed a willpower test and starts looking like exactly what we should expect from:

• An evolutionary history that uses sweetness—especially liquid sweetness—as an urgent signal to store fat.

• A food environment that has made liquid sweetness and “animal feed for humans” cheap, constant, and socially invisible.

• A cultural script that still tells people the problem is “not enough exercise,” while selling them sugar in cups with pictures of athletes on the side.

We do not need another campaign telling people to count calories harder or buy gym memberships in January.

We need to say, clearly, that:

• Sweet makes us fat, especially when it comes in liquid form and especially when it comes early and often.

• Coffee chains and “healthy” juice bars that sell liquid dessert for breakfast are part of the fast‑food problem, not an escape from it.

• Ultra‑processed, corn‑ and soy‑based products designed to be eaten quickly with those drinks are not “food” in the evolutionary sense. They are feed.

Exercise remains wonderful—for health, for function, for mood, and for keeping weight off once we remove the constant “store fat now” signal. But if we want to reverse the obesity epidemic, the first and simplest intervention is not a treadmill.

It is to stop drinking dessert and stop pretending that feed is food.