China has protested that its space station was compelled to avoid collisions with satellites launched by Elon Musk’s Starlink Internet Services project, prompting a backlash on social media.
Beijing said that the country’s space station had two “close encounters” with Starlink satellites this year.
The instances that prompted the allegations to the United Nations’ space agency have yet to be independently verified.
Mr Musk’s SpaceX operates the Starlink satellite internet network.
Mr Musk is well-known in China, despite the fact that his electric car company, Tesla, is under increasing regulatory investigation.
According to a paper provided by China to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs this month, the occurrences occurred on July 1 and October 21.
“The China Space Station adopted preemptive collision avoidance control for safety considerations,” Beijing stated in a paper posted on the agency’s website.
A request for information was not promptly returned by SpaceX.
Mr Musk, Starlink, and the United States were strongly chastised after the complaint was made public on China’s Weibo microblogging platform, which is similar to Twitter.
“Just a pile of space garbage,” one user said of Starlink’s satellites.
Others claimed that the satellites are “American space warfare weapons” and that “Musk is a new ‘weapon’ developed by the US government and military.”
“The risks of Starlink are gradually being disclosed, the entire human species will suffer for their economic operations,” wrote another.
China also accused the US of endangering astronauts by failing to follow treaty responsibilities in outer space.
China is asking the US to act responsibly, according to Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhao Lijian.
Scientists have expressed alarm about the dangers of collisions in space and have urged world governments to exchange information about the estimated 30,000 satellites and other space junk orbiting the Earth.
Being part of the Starlink system, SpaceX has already launched about 1,900 satellites and aims to launch thousands more.
Nasa, the United States’ space agency, postponed a spacewalk from the International Space Station last month due to concerns about space debris.
