Space gets messy: Thousands of satellites crowd Earth's orbital highways
Low Earth orbit now hosts more than 14k satellites and millions of debris pieces creating traffic-management challenges. UN experts push for global data-sharing to prevent costly space collisions
The space around Earth is getting super-crowded these days‚ with more than 14k satellites (including 3.5k dead ones) circling our planet: its becoming a real traffic-jam up there
Low Earth orbit – the most-used space zone – faces a major clean-up challenge with about 120M bits of space-junk floating around. Aarti Holla-Maini‚ who leads the UNʼs space office says we need to act fast: cooperation between countries and companies is key to avoid crashes
Thereʼs no time to lose on space traffic coordination; we have to do everything we can to ensure space safety
Recent events show how risky things are getting: last Aug a Chinese rocket went boom adding lots of debris‚ and back in June a Russian satellite broke apart (making astronauts hide in the space station for an hour)
The situation is getting worse – especially in popular orbit zones like where SpaceX puts its Starlink satellites (540-570km up). Some facts about the mess:
- Starlink has 6.7k satellites up there now
- Their satellites had to dodge other objects 50k times in early-2024
- The 800-900km zone has 3.1k objects making up 20% of all orbital mass
- Close calls between satellites went up 17% this past year
Getting countries to work together isnt easy though – some dont want to share info because of defense secrets; others worry about giving away business info. The UNʼs trying to fix this but time is running out: space needs traffic rules just like planes do on Earth
