Rehearse the crisis. Step inside the decision.

Illustrative reconstruction from public catalogue data (CelesTrak / Space-Track) and published analysis. In the 3D view every orbit and every fragment position comes from a current element set. Two things are set back to 2009, and both move the orbitrather than the object. Seventeen years of nodal precession have carried both ascending nodes away from where they were, so each track is rotated about the Earth’s polar axis (the axis that precession turns them about, which leaves inclination, altitude and shape alone) until its own 72.5°N crossing sits on the documented contact meridian. Each object’s phase is then set so it reaches that crossing at the moment of contact, and it rides its own real path at a constant rate throughout. Which crossing is not a free choice: Iridium 33 runs northbound and Cosmos 2251 south-eastbound, the geometry Kelso’s AMOS 2009 analysis describes and the one NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office corroborates. So placed, the two pass about 8 km apart, their planes crossing at 103° — which independently reproduces the documented closing speed, since at a given altitude that speed and the crossing angle determine each other. Contact falls at the documented latitude and longitude, slightly lower than in 2009 because both orbits have decayed since. The debris spread compresses seventeen years into the replay: fragments start together and are pulled apart along their parent’s orbit before settling on their real tracked positions, which is the actual mechanism but not an operational simulation. The consequence is not illustrative: several hundred fragments of this 2009 collision are still tracked on orbit today.