Starlink’s got company — and orbital overcrowding is a disaster waiting to happen
1 min read
Summary
Competition in the satellite market is hotting up, with Amazon’s Project Kuiper joining SpaceX’s Starlink, UK-based OneWeb and other operators in planning large satellite mega-constellations.
There are now over 2,500 objects in low-Earth orbit, with the number of active satellites comparable to the number of debris pieces.
The European Space Agency (ESA) estimates that by 2050, there could be almost 50,000 objects larger than 10cm in low-Earth orbit.
If current trends in launch continue, there could be an average of eight satellites launched daily from Earth, or a total mass of four tons of material sent into space daily.
Not only are the working satellites filling space, but there are also millions of pieces of junk, travelling at extremely high speeds, which are virtually impossible to track and prevent from colliding.
If enough collisions of even small debris pieces occur, they could create more and more debris, causing more and more collisions, creating a “cascade effect”, particularly in lower Earth orbit, where thousands of commercial objects are coexisting with pieces of debris.