WASHINGTON - As companies sketch out plans for orbital data center constellations the size of a small moon, experts have politely suggested that perhaps everyone should agree on which side of the road to drive before turning low Earth orbit into the galaxy's worst parking lot.

During a July 29 panel hosted by the Secure World Foundation, government and industry officials noted that deploying tens of thousands to a million satellites requires some basic coordination - like, say, not slamming into each other at 17,000 miles per hour.

Ezra Feilden, co-founder and CTO of Starcloud (which has filed plans for an 88,000-satellite constellation), pointed to SpaceX's Starlink as a role model. "They're operating essentially without any major safety issues," he said, calling Starlink a good example for conjunction avoidance and end-of-life procedures. Of course, Starlink has only about 10,000 operational satellites - a mere 1% of SpaceX's proposed orbital data center fleet. That jump could turn a manageable traffic problem into a demolition derby.

"In the current constellations, there are hundreds of thousands of maneuvers annually," said Ron Birk of The Aerospace Corp. "With up to a million spacecraft, that could be more like half a billion maneuvers." That's a lot of cosmic parallel parking.

Feilden argued that collision risks shouldn't scale quadratically if satellites are parked in non-intersecting dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbits. "I think we should treat it like geostationary orbit," he said, "which requires a different framework." But there's a catch: all those satellites need to orbit in the same direction. "If we all choose just one or the other, traffic flows together," he explained. "Otherwise, it's a highway without deciding which side of the road traffic goes on - with enormous head-on collision risks."

Jeff O'Neil of Planet compared the situation to the development of global air traffic control, suggesting the Commerce Department's TraCSS system could set similar standards. Matias Cava of the Office of Space Commerce noted their new Space Commerce Certification system - currently voluntary - and urged operators not to wait for government mandates. "Think about how you'd want your competitors to act in space," he said.

Feilden summed it up: "Today, we need to decide which side of the road we're going to be driving on." Preferably before someone builds a satellite that wants to drive on the ceiling.