It's incredible how many satellites Space X have launched
It's also surprising from a layman's perspective the "freedom" to launch rockets into space without necessarily needing permission, the originating country of course needs to approve it but none else
The most obvious is that any international body would be easily controlled by the big players, so you'd end up with more centralized control by the same national entities, but now they'd be controlling other countries launches as well.
The other problem is that lately international organizations have a pretty bad track record. Two examples, which I've chosen because they are actually both very important incidents and also squarely in the domain of the respective orgs: WHO with Covid with a mostly useless and visibly politicized reaction; and UN with Gaza, with a large block of Arab voters who are basically stuck at condemning Israel, but systematically refuse to actually step up and help with the problem. Both incidents are literally what those orgs were created to handle, and yet they don't.
Also space launches have a military component, not always public. I doubt many would agree to let an international body poke their nose in that.
If we aren't careful with space debris [1], deorbit protocols [2], and anti-satellite weapons [3], we risk triggering a Kessler syndrome [4] and permanently blocking our access to space. We currently have no international space agreements outside of not putting nuclear weapons in space, which is wholly inadequate for managing the dangers and safety of space development.
The only reason space has been managed decently well until now is because most of it was done through the US and Europe that have very strict regulations around safety. Don't expect this good behaviour to continue.
> "The only reason space has been managed decently well until now is because most of it was done through the US and Europe that have very strict regulations around safety. Don't expect this good behaviour to continue."
That's a very ahistoric narrative. There's been *zero* regulation around space debris in either the US or Europe, for almost the entire space era up until now—most of it isn't in effect yet. Far from being "strictly regulated", US space operates recklessly with regards to space debris. One ongoing example: spent (ULA) Centaur upper stages have exploded in orbit in four separate incidents since 2018, due to ULA's negligence in correctly passivating/deenergizing them. Which they were never obligated to do anyway—not by regulation,
The reality is that space debris is a less consequential problem than you'd get from reading HN; the early players in space could, and did, get away with being extraordinarily negligent.
I think you just argued my point. These are the countries that have the most rules. We've effectively relied on NASA being very careful until recently (yet we still have issues of recklessness and carelessness), but that is not gonna fly (pun intended) going forward.
> There's been zero regulation around space debris in either the US or Europe
I present to you Project West Ford [1], and its influence on the original creation of the Outer Space Treaty. Though the wording of the treaty itself makes little mention of space debris explicitly, it's indeed part of the treaty. But the mild wording and weak enforcement are insufficient to deter recklessness.
- Article I – Freedom of Use and Access
- Article IX – Due Regard and International Consultation
Meh, orbits and nuclei are vastly different scales, I've tried to simulate this by making everything in space-track a 10km radius sphere and it was just a few starlink nudging each other a couple times a week.
I don’t think it really is MAD; for example in a war (I mention this because the comment a couple up talks about anti-satellite weapons) where one side has a major satellite advantage, the other side would probably be tempted to kick off Kessler syndrome. It is a long term problem but the potentially pro-Kessler side doesn’t care much unless they win, and it doesn’t actually cause them major destruction until they want to go start exploring space again (which would probably be put on pause until the war is over).
And, it would be really bad. But to some extent, can you blame them? If they are getting whacked every day by GPS guided bombs or drones, or they are being outsmarted by satellite-gathered intelligence, why should they take it? If we’ve put parts of our weapons in space, we’re the ones weaponizing it, right?
There are basically countless examples in human history of disparate self-interested parties overusing a shared resource and failing to regulate themselves until that resource becomes unusable for everyone involved, from the most micro scale office fridge scenario through to global scale like ocean overfishing and carbon emissions. I don’t see how polluting orbital space is much different than polluting our water, soil, and air.
By that same reasoning everyone should be doing their best to avoid runaway climate change, yet here we are. The tragedy of the commons is tragic.
Things are more civilized in space, maybe in part because of the relatively small number of big players. But at the same time there are tentative signs that we might be in the early stages of Kessler syndrome. It's hard to tell, and by the time we can tell with certainty it might be hard to still act in time
I think the difference is "perceived cost of the catastrophe". Many parties believe or choose to believe that all the damage done can be reversed, or it can't be that bad (which is very wrong, BTW) or, I'll die anyway, who cares.
For space, this perceived cost might be higher so, the limited number of parties might be more cautious.
Indeed I'm aware of The Tragedy of Commons, but from my view, space is a bit more nuanced.
Wish we were much more diligent about our planet though. We, humans, pillage it like all resources are infinite. Sad.
Hi my name is SpaceY and I get paid to launch other companies payloads. What happens once they're deployed in orbit is the customer's responsibility, we specialize only in launching.
Companies don't work for the public good, or even their own good, most of the time. Strange that you'd expect that to change.
It's completely incapable of "permanently blocking access to space". What it's capable of is "shit up specific orbit groups so that you can't loiter in them for years unless you accept a significant collision risk".
Notably, the low end of LEO is exempt, because the atmosphere just eats space debris there. And things like missions to Moon or Mars are largely unaffected - because they have no reason to spend years in affected orbits.
LEO is indeed exempt (which is a great thing given that it's getting quite crowded up there). But we could easily break geostationary orbits from being viable, as they don't decay from atmospheric drag.
In the ISS decommission report that evaluated different retirement plans [1] for the ISS, the suggestion to park the ISS in a higher orbit was evaluated but dismissed because raising its orbit out of LEO would increase collision risk to >4 years lifetime, and raising it further requires too much fuel.
ISS is currenrly in the higher end of LEO, meaning most debri decay away slowly. But higher orbits are already hazardous, and our space development is still very small-scale in those orbits. "loiter around for years" is already at 5 years. And that's with a relatively small amount of development and short history. If we want to do space in anther 100 year without inch-thick steel armour on our rockets that leave earth, we need some regulation around this.
> The tragedy of the commons is the concept that, if many people enjoy unfettered access to a finite, valuable resource, such as a pasture, they will tend to overuse it and may end up destroying its value altogether. Even if some users exercised voluntary restraint, the other users would merely replace them, the predictable result being a "tragedy" for all.
There is no right of absolute freedom, because at some point that freedom affects other people who also have rights. So we're always limited explicitly and implicitly in what we can do. Free, unfettered access just means taking something away from somebody else.
Space is the one resource that isn't finite. And even in LEO, the amount of space is huge. It's about the same surface area of the earth, but tens of kilometers thick.
We used to have to leave a lot of space between satellites because their orbits varied unpredictably, but we've gotten better at packing them.
Someday we'll talk about the days of 5000 satellites like we talk about when computers had 4096 bytes of RAM, and it will be fine.
That police and justice courts don't catch every thief is not an argument to abolish the judiciary or make stealing legal. That police and judges habitually act in favor of certain people is likewise not an indication that a society without regulatory institutions is better off than one with admittedly flawed ones.
Police and courts have legitimacy because they are created by the sovereign nation. There is no sovereign entity above the nation - you're comparing apples and hammers.
If nations have legitimacy then they can enter into supra-/international bodies and agreements with legitimacy much like two persons can agree on an arbiter to resolve differences in their mutual contracts. This is nothing new and we've been doing it for a long time—the Egyptian 18th dynasty entered into the first known peace treaty with a foreign nation 1500 years BCE; NATO and the United Nations are modern examples. The US, of course, is a country that has been notoriously difficult to get into international agreements (Paris/Kyoto, WHO, ICC).
Those international bodies and agreements only have legitimacy because nations agree that they do.
To take a slightly different take, Mexico exists as an objective fact. The EU can decide not to recognize Mexico as a country but Mexico continues to exist and faces basically no adverse reaction from this. If the countries that make up the EU decided it was done and stopped acknowledging it, it would cease to exist. It has no population, no military, no land. No means of projecting force. Mexico retains these properties and abilities regardless of any agreements to the contrary, or lack thereof.
I'm not saying international agreements don't exist but that they have no inherent sovereignty because they are by definition but hand-shake agreements between independent sovereign members.
The UN would be the obvious entity that comes closest to a world government, but with people like the clown in the White House in charge, it would be a hopeless endeavour to even propose to let them take care of the orbit.
At some point regulation will be necessary, or accidents will happen; the way the world is heading, it’s probably going to be accidents.
The only countries even capable of enforcing launch bans stand to gain nothing from them because it just makes launching their own payloads more difficult. There's like ~10 or so countries who are readily launch capable and even less with the military capability to put any pressure to stop foreign launches.
Who's going to regulate? Regulation only works when someone has the power to enforce them. Right now the people with that power aren't the most agreeable. And flexing it is either antagonizing western allies or a declaration of war.
I will; when I am elected God-Emperor, I will set up a global defense network that will shoot down any unauthorised launches. I will also build a space palace, because I can.
Only half-joking; space will be regulated when one force becomes dominant and individual countries' rights are taken away, OR when the majority of countries, but specifically the biggest and most powerful ones, get to an agreement - but given the significant differences between e.g. the US, China, India and Russia, that's unlikely to happen anytime soon. So at the moment, a globally dominant world power setting the rules will be the likely candidate.
But first, there needs to be a tipping point of sorts, a line that is crossed. That'll either be space-based weapons or missile defense systems, or simply being out-competed. It'll be at least another decade plus billions of investments before any other nation or company can start to compete with SpaceX's launch capacity, and they haven't stopped yet; if Spaceship becomes viable they and the US will have a huge lead, and the launch capability to set up a global missile detection / defense / space offense network.
wrong.
NK as an example has the capacity to design and deliver and deploy load after load after load of small rusty ball bearings into random low earth orbits, leaving existing geo syncronous
satelites as the only platforms operating in earths orbit, SK, Japan, France, etc ,etc, etc,....russia, china,.......many large industrial companies(mitsu, hiundi, various name shify US companies)..... can just shut the whole thing down long before any emperor starts issueing edicts from orbit.
this is the classic example of where the "defence" is orders of magnitude easier and cheaper than the "offence"
> NK as an example has the capacity to design and deliver and deploy load after load after load of small rusty ball bearings into random low earth orbits
Funny that the only country that actually did that was the US...
International cooperation can still work even though there is very rarely a realistic prospect of enforcement. No one is going to war to enforce WTO rulings or nuclear non-proliferation treaties, for example.
It's true that when things get really hairy international law tends to fall by the wayside, eg countries leaving the Land Mine Ban Treaty now that it seems possible they may actually have to deal with a foreign invader on their soil. But they can still be effective at regulating states' behaviour in more peaceful times, which is still useful.
But it does require the major powers to be willing (i) to talk to each other, and (ii) to think about the world beyond their own borders, which means it's unlikely to happen given the current leadership in certain of the big space-going nations.
A country was last bombed in an attempt to enforce the NPT less than two months ago.
And of the conditions you listed, you missed the big one. The big, powerful countries must directly benefit, they have never signed up to a treaty where they don't.
Unfortunately, there's no real way to regulate this. I used to worry about space junk and companies polluting space, but now I'm more concerned about what's inside those satellites. With no regulations in place, they can put pretty much anything up there.
I wouldn't be surprised if a few of those satellites had nuclear weapons inside (or maybe that's just me being paranoid.) Still, having satellites that can take out other satellites during a conflict is definitely a possibility. Which brings me back to my original concern: space junk. The last thing we need is a graveyard of satellites floating above our heads.
The UN is fundamentally and terminally flawed and always has been from the very beginning as ruse for what has always been a facade of “America’s” control of the world.
It is why the UN lair is right on the East River, a proverbial stone’s throw away from Wall Street, Madison Ave, and Broad Street in the heart of the American Empire of world domination.
It's really not all that surprising that space is treated like the oceans. There certainly are rules and norms of behavior, but you don't need to ask for permission to enter it.
At this point I'd like to make the case that, shall we say, 'selfish' actors are indeed a problem on the oceans, for example in the form of fishing vessels that invade the fishing grounds of other peoples and foreign nations and are not held accountable by anyone to any kind of standard in terms of ecosystem impact, overfishing and so on.
It's a genuinely international problem that can hardly be solved by throwing up one's hands and sighing that the oceans are free for everyone and ergo there's nothing that can be done. I believe one could convince a lot of people that there should be limits, I just have to scale up bad behaviors: fishing a species to extinction? pouring toxic waste into the waters? using dynamite for fishing? scraping ocean floors for minerals and turning thriving ecosystems into vast lifeless deserts? huge dragnets that catch and kill everything? Some of these things may not resonate with all people but almost everyone will answer Yes, that should not be allowed, at some point.
> "freedom" to launch rockets into space without necessarily needing permission
Space is another public commons. I will assume it will follow the same trajectory as other public commons. A few decades of abuse, leading to consequences, leading to regulations. But the regulations won't happen until the consequences happens.
Permission granted by whom? Agencies and companies that launch satellites are subject only to the laws of the countries in which they are based. And it is not even imaginable to have a NPT-like system where a few "special" countries have the right to launch satellites while the others don't.
I understand you may want it to fall to the UN, but to the extent that it does it is merely a courtesy.
If someone wants to launch satellites with a radio violating every ITU regulation there is, unless someone is going to knock on their door with a gun, it doesn't mean squat. The buck stops at your nation's capital - if they're okay with what you're doing, you can do it. Everything else is just diplomatic window dressing and doesn't really mean anything at the end of the day.
The country is the atomic unit of global governance. Everything else is just hand-shake deals and "promises." If your country says you can do something, you can do it.
I agree. I wonder if handing things over to private companies is a way for governments to avoid red tape and shift accountability if something goes wrong.
What would be needed is an international organization formed by at least all nations that have orbital launch capabilities to act as an FAA of sorts for rocket launches in general and putting things into orbit in particular. Earth orbit, and Low Earth Orbit especially so, is a limited resource and the outlook of permanently ruining dark skies globally or turning the skies into a big garbage patch that could make space travel impossible for centuries to come (aka Kessler syndrome) is just too bleak to not do it carefully with sustainability in mind.
> It added 2,300+ satellites in the one year period ending Jun 2025.
Take in account, that a lot of those are replacement sats for the first generations that they are deorbiting already. Do not quote me on this, but its a insane amount (i though it was around 2k) of the first generation that they are deorbiting. If there is a issue, its not the amount of sats in space, but more the insane amount of deorbiting StarLink is doing.
Starlink wanted to put up insane numbers, but a lot of their fights contain a large percentage of replacement sats.
And they are getting bigger ... v1.5 is like 300kg, the v2.0 mini (ironic as its far from mini compared to its predecessors) are 800kg.
So before StarLink launched 60x v1.5's but now they are doing 21x v2.0 Mini's per launch.
The technology has been improving a lot, allowing for a lot more capacity per satellite. Not sure when they start launching v3's but those have like 3x the capacity for inner connects/ground stations and can go up to 1Gbit speeds (compared to the v2's who are again much more capable then multiple v1.5s).
So what we are seeing is less satellites per launch but more capacity per sat. This year is the last year that they are doing mass 1.5 launches, its all now going to the v2.0 "mini" (so 3x less sats).
Satellite constellations in LEO tend to have short design lives of 5 years or so, but the net change in operating satellites since that 2021 graphic is huge: Starlink alone has over 8000 in orbit now (plus another 1200 deorbited). The later generations of Starlink are bigger, but the launch cadence increases...
Which was a very outdated number even back when this article was published two years ago
I'm not sure what the exact number was in 2023, but according to [1] it was 6718 at the end of 2022. With that kind of growth, quoting two year old numbers isn't all that helpful
Not sure if number of satellites matters so much at this point. As India has already demonstrated that they can launch 100s of them on one rocket. Which means they can very cheaply put them into space as needed.
If you are trying to create satellite internet in low earth orbit (for reduced ping/latency) the satellite moves faster than the earth spins, and the user on the ground loses point to point contact. So there has to be another satellite already over the horizon before the first one goes out of view. Wiki says Starlink sats travel at about 340 miles above the ground.
The easiest alternative to implement is having the satellites in a geostationary orbit so that they are always above a single spot. The altitude necessary for this is higher than 20k miles, and results in very bad ping/latency. Inmarsat is one of these, and I had a chance to use it in the past. It was slow and laggy, as the realities of physics would suggest.
So more satellites means more potential coverage of the globe, or increased capacity over existing coverage regions, or both. It seems very important.
The Indian satellites in the article weighed on average around 6 kilograms. A starlink satellite weighs 227 kg. You can put more telecom equipment in 227 kg than in 6kg. A better metric than #of satellites is probably total mass of satellites, to make broad comparisons more meaningful.
This really isn't all that much if you pause to consider it. For example. Lets take the larger possible number of 7500 plus 2,300 plus the 4,550 satellites noted up to 2021. That's a total of just under 15,000 satellites. Most of those are fairly small objects, at the most about the size of a typical mini-van, with most being quite a bit smaller than that.
Now, all of this is spread over a three-dimensional topography that's much larger than the total surface area of the Earth, and because their orbits are, as mentioned, three-dimensionally occupying various altitudes, the size of the total topography they move through is enormously larger than just one single surface area in square kilometers of a single hypothetical sphere X km above the Earth's surface. In the least case, even if all existing orbital satellites were stationed at the lowest possible orbital altitude, that's still quite a bit bigger than the 509 600 000 square km of the Earth's total surface. (too lazy to calculate the specific increment in this moment)
Across all of that, just 15,000 objects that are individually smaller than your average family sedan.
For comparison, the island of Manhattan has approximately 116,000 buildings crammed into it. If you spread those more or less equi-distantly from each other across the whole of the Earth's surface, water or air, there'd still be a tremendous amount of empty space between them. That's nearly 10 times as many objects individually much larger than any human satellite, across a much smaller surface area than what's occupied by our orbital satellites.
(Yes, I know we also have a shit-load of other inert junk zipping around up there at tens of thousands of KM per hour, but even if that stuff, most of which is very tiny, were included, we're still talking about an enormous amount of empty space between objects)
But apart from all the other stuff you mention, you’re missing an important point: these things move. And unless all objects are synchronized (which they are not) they occupy a whole orbit, not only their actual volume. If two orbits intersect, the objects occupying those will eventually collide.
Yes. This is the idea behind Kessler Syndrome - that the accumulation of clutter in Earth orbit could lead to an "ablation cascade" as more and more things collide and more and more debris is created from those collisions leading to Earth orbit becoming too hazardous to traverse.
"A 1 kg object impacting at 10 km/s, for example, is probably capable of catastrophically breaking up a 1,000 kg spacecraft if it strikes a high-density element in the spacecraft. In such a breakup, numerous fragments larger than 1 kg would be created." https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/library/a-technical-asses...
I believe I described it badly or you misunderstood me then. What I was referring to in my mention of three-dimensionality is that the area in which all of them orbit isn't a single flat plane over a sphere shape. It's actually several flat planes layered on top of each other, with an obviously ever greater surface area the higher you go. Thus you have LEO, MEO and GEO satellites all sharing orbital space but at different heights so to speak. I'm aware that any given satellite generally flies along a fixed altitude (though as far as I know their latitude along that altitude can shift enormously)
I suppose each satellite has its orbit defined by the elliptical path (4 parameters). Like for GEO you can have many satellites in a single elliptical path.
You can also probably have different satellites on different ellipses whose paths intersect with each other, but the timing is such that they never collide.
What you say is important of course, and it's what makes me less than sure in my assessment. It was after all more of a mental exercise in appreciating just how vast an area of space this relatively tiny quantity of objects is spread across.
To give one further perspective example here: a single large bulk container ship can carry up to 8,500 car-sized units.
This means that even if every single one of the maybe 15,000 satellites in orbit were the size of a car (most of them are much smaller actually), all together, they'd fill no more than the storage spaces of two bulk container ships with lots of room to spare at that.
This, spread over a multi-layered area as vast as our orbital space, means that even with their constantly moving at incredible speeds, and all the junk out there scattered between the satellites themselves, there's an enormous amount of emptiness between it all mitigating against impacts being very likely or frequent at all.
After all, of the 8,070 or so Starlink satellites in orbit right now, there's little mention of more than a few having been knocked out by debris in orbit. It seems that solar storms are their much bigger worry and cause of mishaps.
As the saying goes, space is huge, sometimes more than our brains can easily comprehend. This applies even in the comparatively tiny orbital regions of it that we use daily.
The mental exercise is fine for realising that satellites don't look as big as pictures of satellites in graphics, it's just missing the point that if you don't want to hit a 20cm x 20cm x 20cm cube that moves at 17,500 mph and has slow and limited capability to adjust that movement you need to allow it quite a bit more space, and be able to predict its movement accurately relative to yours. Especially if any collision means thousands of pieces of shrapnel that continue to move at 17500mph for decades or more, whilst potentially being too small to track but large enough to do a lot of damage.
Trains take up a negligible fraction of the mileage of the lines they operate on and rarely cross other lines, but signalling is still critical.
All of these are useful things to keep in mind of course, and they're why I put forth my consideration as a thought experiment for perspective, not so much as an absolute assertion. Orbital space is complicated, and the the ramifications of accidents are extremely unique compared to those that apply in a terrestrial context, but I still stand by my point about it being absurdly big enough that a sense of proportion is needed in worrying about something like Kessler syndrome.
To those downvoting a completely innocuous comment like this and my other replies below, which simply put forth a thought experiment for the sake of debate, without asserting anything at all controversial: Grow an adult brain, no? idiotic as the downvote feature is in general, one would at least assume that the self-professed "intellectually above-average" readers of a site like this would use it better than 12-year-old rage-lords on a 4chan thread.
Would be kind of interesting to build a “live” visualization of objects in earths orbit. But this would require accurate live data of those objects. Probably nothing that companies would publish.
On the other hand side: once the object and its orbit is identified, positions could be calculated…
> Did you know that we provide flexible and robust data acquisition hardware and software that can be used for testing satellites, rockets, airplanes, or helicopters in the air, in space, or on the ground? Our solutions are used and trusted by leading aerospace companies. Contact us to learn more.
Interesting article for a sales pitch. Nicely done.
For anyone interested in current data like this, Jonathan McDowell maintains GCAT which is a General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects (and does so fastidiously).
It looks like (if I've parsed right) every one of them stands for "Earth", except that HEO alone can also be overloaded three ways (high-earth, highly-elliptical, and highly-eccentric).
This is unimportant, but: a site:nasa.gov search shows all three "HEO" acronyms in common use, there; and even Wikipedia abbreviates it inconsistently across entries[0-2].
The phrase "highly elliptical" is one where I know exactly what they mean but the more I think about it the more wrong it seems. It should be "Highly eccentric orbit".
All shapes which satisfy {(x,y)| x^2/a^2 + y^2/b^2 = 1} for fixed values of a,b in R are elliptical. Something is either elliptical or not - it's not a matter of degree. A circle is just as elliptical as a more eccentric ellipse in the same way that a square is just as rectangular as a more elongated rectangle.
I thought GEO stood for Geostationary Earth Orbit, since a geostationary orbit must be equatorial anyway. But actually "Earth" would also be redundant, since "Geo-" already stands for Earth.
I understand it's both, but "equatorial" is more precise to distinguish it from GSO, a non-equatorial [g]eo[s]ynchronous [o]rbit. Otherwise, they would both be "GEO".
Pretty wild to think that over a third of all the satellites orbiting Earth belong to one private company. Space used to feel like the domain of governments and sci-fi
Europe is a more finite geospatial target. Fewer resources required. France has already stated they have the capability to fill the gap for Ukraine for up-to-date movements along the 1,000+ km line. They are currently working on the next generation program, IRIS, with a target date of 2027.
Those Swedish military satellites are just kept extremely secret.
Countries like Germany, Spain, France and Italy does have a number of satellites and it doesn't seem to be specified what they are doing. It would be weird if none of those where not military.
A 1 unit CubeSat is 10cm³ and max 2kg / unit, occupying a particular location in an LEO orbit at 28,000 km/h / 17,000 mph doesn’t want to be bumping in to anything either.
So about 11000 units in the low orbit in 2025 and thats a mix of commercial and state satellites. I wonder how the traffic and distribution being governed
LEO traffic is primarily coordinated through the ITU for frequency allocation and conjunction alerts from the US Space Force's 18th Space Defense Squadron, though there's no binding international framework for orbital slot management.
Off-topic but wow, what a nice, concise and no-bullshit cookie banner. I wish everyone's cookie banner was like this, the web would have been a better place! Seriously.
Madman seems better than a con-man. All those satellites for an unnecessary service that could never become profitable...
Is this the node_modules/js ecosystem for space? 7k+ satellites for a service that Viasat and others can do with ~10. Supposedly Starlink has better ping, but as it's still unusable for gaming, it doesn't appear nearly as beneficial.
Leaked internal documents show that last year, Starlink made $72M net income on $2.7B in revenue.[1] Their revenue growth rate is ≈90% year over year. They're spending most of that on expansion (paying SpaceX for more launches, manufacturing more/better satellites, and manufacturing terminals). If they wanted to, they could scale back these expenditures and rake in the money. But long-term, they stand to gain more if they spend their revenues on ways to grow their business. Their customer base has increased by 30% since those financial statements came out, so their finances are most likely in even better shape now.
For comparison, last year Viasat had $4.3B in revenue and lost $1B. This year their revenue has been flat. They lost revenue in communication services (probably from Starlink) and gained revenue in military contracts.[2]
It's incredible how many satellites Space X have launched
It's also surprising from a layman's perspective the "freedom" to launch rockets into space without necessarily needing permission, the originating country of course needs to approve it but none else
That's... good? In more ways than one.
The most obvious is that any international body would be easily controlled by the big players, so you'd end up with more centralized control by the same national entities, but now they'd be controlling other countries launches as well.
The other problem is that lately international organizations have a pretty bad track record. Two examples, which I've chosen because they are actually both very important incidents and also squarely in the domain of the respective orgs: WHO with Covid with a mostly useless and visibly politicized reaction; and UN with Gaza, with a large block of Arab voters who are basically stuck at condemning Israel, but systematically refuse to actually step up and help with the problem. Both incidents are literally what those orgs were created to handle, and yet they don't.
Also space launches have a military component, not always public. I doubt many would agree to let an international body poke their nose in that.
If we aren't careful with space debris [1], deorbit protocols [2], and anti-satellite weapons [3], we risk triggering a Kessler syndrome [4] and permanently blocking our access to space. We currently have no international space agreements outside of not putting nuclear weapons in space, which is wholly inadequate for managing the dangers and safety of space development.
The only reason space has been managed decently well until now is because most of it was done through the US and Europe that have very strict regulations around safety. Don't expect this good behaviour to continue.
1. https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/spacestation/2025/04/30/station-m...
2. https://www.livescience.com/chinese-rocket-booster-fourth-la...
3. https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2007-03/chinese-satellite-de...
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
> "The only reason space has been managed decently well until now is because most of it was done through the US and Europe that have very strict regulations around safety. Don't expect this good behaviour to continue."
That's a very ahistoric narrative. There's been *zero* regulation around space debris in either the US or Europe, for almost the entire space era up until now—most of it isn't in effect yet. Far from being "strictly regulated", US space operates recklessly with regards to space debris. One ongoing example: spent (ULA) Centaur upper stages have exploded in orbit in four separate incidents since 2018, due to ULA's negligence in correctly passivating/deenergizing them. Which they were never obligated to do anyway—not by regulation,
https://spacenews.com/faa-to-complete-orbital-debris-upper-s... ("FAA to complete orbital debris upper stage regulations in 2025")
The reality is that space debris is a less consequential problem than you'd get from reading HN; the early players in space could, and did, get away with being extraordinarily negligent.
I think you just argued my point. These are the countries that have the most rules. We've effectively relied on NASA being very careful until recently (yet we still have issues of recklessness and carelessness), but that is not gonna fly (pun intended) going forward.
> There's been zero regulation around space debris in either the US or Europe
I present to you Project West Ford [1], and its influence on the original creation of the Outer Space Treaty. Though the wording of the treaty itself makes little mention of space debris explicitly, it's indeed part of the treaty. But the mild wording and weak enforcement are insufficient to deter recklessness.
- Article I – Freedom of Use and Access
- Article IX – Due Regard and International Consultation
- Article VI – International Responsibility
- Article VII – Liability
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford
Meh, orbits and nuclei are vastly different scales, I've tried to simulate this by making everything in space-track a 10km radius sphere and it was just a few starlink nudging each other a couple times a week.
> Don't expect this good behaviour to continue.
I don't agree. Kessler syndrome is another M.A.D. scenario. Nobody would want it to poison the well for everyone incl. themselves.
I don’t think it really is MAD; for example in a war (I mention this because the comment a couple up talks about anti-satellite weapons) where one side has a major satellite advantage, the other side would probably be tempted to kick off Kessler syndrome. It is a long term problem but the potentially pro-Kessler side doesn’t care much unless they win, and it doesn’t actually cause them major destruction until they want to go start exploring space again (which would probably be put on pause until the war is over).
And, it would be really bad. But to some extent, can you blame them? If they are getting whacked every day by GPS guided bombs or drones, or they are being outsmarted by satellite-gathered intelligence, why should they take it? If we’ve put parts of our weapons in space, we’re the ones weaponizing it, right?
There are basically countless examples in human history of disparate self-interested parties overusing a shared resource and failing to regulate themselves until that resource becomes unusable for everyone involved, from the most micro scale office fridge scenario through to global scale like ocean overfishing and carbon emissions. I don’t see how polluting orbital space is much different than polluting our water, soil, and air.
By that same reasoning everyone should be doing their best to avoid runaway climate change, yet here we are. The tragedy of the commons is tragic.
Things are more civilized in space, maybe in part because of the relatively small number of big players. But at the same time there are tentative signs that we might be in the early stages of Kessler syndrome. It's hard to tell, and by the time we can tell with certainty it might be hard to still act in time
I think the difference is "perceived cost of the catastrophe". Many parties believe or choose to believe that all the damage done can be reversed, or it can't be that bad (which is very wrong, BTW) or, I'll die anyway, who cares.
For space, this perceived cost might be higher so, the limited number of parties might be more cautious.
Indeed I'm aware of The Tragedy of Commons, but from my view, space is a bit more nuanced.
Wish we were much more diligent about our planet though. We, humans, pillage it like all resources are infinite. Sad.
Hi my name is SpaceY and I get paid to launch other companies payloads. What happens once they're deployed in orbit is the customer's responsibility, we specialize only in launching.
Companies don't work for the public good, or even their own good, most of the time. Strange that you'd expect that to change.
> Strange that you'd expect that to change.
I don't expect companies to change. I expect government to regulate and oversee...
What's stranger is, people calling for deregulation of everything despite knowing how it's gonna end up.
The fact that the well is constantly being poisoned would belie that fact.
Kessler syndrome is incredibly overrated.
It's completely incapable of "permanently blocking access to space". What it's capable of is "shit up specific orbit groups so that you can't loiter in them for years unless you accept a significant collision risk".
Notably, the low end of LEO is exempt, because the atmosphere just eats space debris there. And things like missions to Moon or Mars are largely unaffected - because they have no reason to spend years in affected orbits.
LEO is indeed exempt (which is a great thing given that it's getting quite crowded up there). But we could easily break geostationary orbits from being viable, as they don't decay from atmospheric drag.
In the ISS decommission report that evaluated different retirement plans [1] for the ISS, the suggestion to park the ISS in a higher orbit was evaluated but dismissed because raising its orbit out of LEO would increase collision risk to >4 years lifetime, and raising it further requires too much fuel.
ISS is currenrly in the higher end of LEO, meaning most debri decay away slowly. But higher orbits are already hazardous, and our space development is still very small-scale in those orbits. "loiter around for years" is already at 5 years. And that's with a relatively small amount of development and short history. If we want to do space in anther 100 year without inch-thick steel armour on our rockets that leave earth, we need some regulation around this.
1. https://www.nasa.gov/faqs-the-international-space-station-tr...
Somebody has never heard of the tragedy of the commons. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
> The tragedy of the commons is the concept that, if many people enjoy unfettered access to a finite, valuable resource, such as a pasture, they will tend to overuse it and may end up destroying its value altogether. Even if some users exercised voluntary restraint, the other users would merely replace them, the predictable result being a "tragedy" for all.
There is no right of absolute freedom, because at some point that freedom affects other people who also have rights. So we're always limited explicitly and implicitly in what we can do. Free, unfettered access just means taking something away from somebody else.
Space is the one resource that isn't finite. And even in LEO, the amount of space is huge. It's about the same surface area of the earth, but tens of kilometers thick.
We used to have to leave a lot of space between satellites because their orbits varied unpredictably, but we've gotten better at packing them.
Someday we'll talk about the days of 5000 satellites like we talk about when computers had 4096 bytes of RAM, and it will be fine.
ITU is the big international body.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunicatio...
That police and justice courts don't catch every thief is not an argument to abolish the judiciary or make stealing legal. That police and judges habitually act in favor of certain people is likewise not an indication that a society without regulatory institutions is better off than one with admittedly flawed ones.
Police and courts have legitimacy because they are created by the sovereign nation. There is no sovereign entity above the nation - you're comparing apples and hammers.
If nations have legitimacy then they can enter into supra-/international bodies and agreements with legitimacy much like two persons can agree on an arbiter to resolve differences in their mutual contracts. This is nothing new and we've been doing it for a long time—the Egyptian 18th dynasty entered into the first known peace treaty with a foreign nation 1500 years BCE; NATO and the United Nations are modern examples. The US, of course, is a country that has been notoriously difficult to get into international agreements (Paris/Kyoto, WHO, ICC).
Those international bodies and agreements only have legitimacy because nations agree that they do.
To take a slightly different take, Mexico exists as an objective fact. The EU can decide not to recognize Mexico as a country but Mexico continues to exist and faces basically no adverse reaction from this. If the countries that make up the EU decided it was done and stopped acknowledging it, it would cease to exist. It has no population, no military, no land. No means of projecting force. Mexico retains these properties and abilities regardless of any agreements to the contrary, or lack thereof.
I'm not saying international agreements don't exist but that they have no inherent sovereignty because they are by definition but hand-shake agreements between independent sovereign members.
And what do you think the downsides to unregulated space launches might be, particularly as commercial launches become more commonly viable?
[dead]
The UN would be the obvious entity that comes closest to a world government, but with people like the clown in the White House in charge, it would be a hopeless endeavour to even propose to let them take care of the orbit.
At some point regulation will be necessary, or accidents will happen; the way the world is heading, it’s probably going to be accidents.
The only countries even capable of enforcing launch bans stand to gain nothing from them because it just makes launching their own payloads more difficult. There's like ~10 or so countries who are readily launch capable and even less with the military capability to put any pressure to stop foreign launches.
Who's going to regulate? Regulation only works when someone has the power to enforce them. Right now the people with that power aren't the most agreeable. And flexing it is either antagonizing western allies or a declaration of war.
> Who's going to regulate?
I will; when I am elected God-Emperor, I will set up a global defense network that will shoot down any unauthorised launches. I will also build a space palace, because I can.
Only half-joking; space will be regulated when one force becomes dominant and individual countries' rights are taken away, OR when the majority of countries, but specifically the biggest and most powerful ones, get to an agreement - but given the significant differences between e.g. the US, China, India and Russia, that's unlikely to happen anytime soon. So at the moment, a globally dominant world power setting the rules will be the likely candidate.
But first, there needs to be a tipping point of sorts, a line that is crossed. That'll either be space-based weapons or missile defense systems, or simply being out-competed. It'll be at least another decade plus billions of investments before any other nation or company can start to compete with SpaceX's launch capacity, and they haven't stopped yet; if Spaceship becomes viable they and the US will have a huge lead, and the launch capability to set up a global missile detection / defense / space offense network.
wrong. NK as an example has the capacity to design and deliver and deploy load after load after load of small rusty ball bearings into random low earth orbits, leaving existing geo syncronous satelites as the only platforms operating in earths orbit, SK, Japan, France, etc ,etc, etc,....russia, china,.......many large industrial companies(mitsu, hiundi, various name shify US companies)..... can just shut the whole thing down long before any emperor starts issueing edicts from orbit. this is the classic example of where the "defence" is orders of magnitude easier and cheaper than the "offence"
> NK as an example has the capacity to design and deliver and deploy load after load after load of small rusty ball bearings into random low earth orbits
Funny that the only country that actually did that was the US...
International cooperation can still work even though there is very rarely a realistic prospect of enforcement. No one is going to war to enforce WTO rulings or nuclear non-proliferation treaties, for example.
It's true that when things get really hairy international law tends to fall by the wayside, eg countries leaving the Land Mine Ban Treaty now that it seems possible they may actually have to deal with a foreign invader on their soil. But they can still be effective at regulating states' behaviour in more peaceful times, which is still useful.
But it does require the major powers to be willing (i) to talk to each other, and (ii) to think about the world beyond their own borders, which means it's unlikely to happen given the current leadership in certain of the big space-going nations.
A country was last bombed in an attempt to enforce the NPT less than two months ago.
And of the conditions you listed, you missed the big one. The big, powerful countries must directly benefit, they have never signed up to a treaty where they don't.
> Regulation only works when someone has the power to enforce them.
And this is why we cannot have nice things
Unfortunately, there's no real way to regulate this. I used to worry about space junk and companies polluting space, but now I'm more concerned about what's inside those satellites. With no regulations in place, they can put pretty much anything up there.
I wouldn't be surprised if a few of those satellites had nuclear weapons inside (or maybe that's just me being paranoid.) Still, having satellites that can take out other satellites during a conflict is definitely a possibility. Which brings me back to my original concern: space junk. The last thing we need is a graveyard of satellites floating above our heads.
The UN is fundamentally and terminally flawed and always has been from the very beginning as ruse for what has always been a facade of “America’s” control of the world.
It is why the UN lair is right on the East River, a proverbial stone’s throw away from Wall Street, Madison Ave, and Broad Street in the heart of the American Empire of world domination.
It's really not all that surprising that space is treated like the oceans. There certainly are rules and norms of behavior, but you don't need to ask for permission to enter it.
At this point I'd like to make the case that, shall we say, 'selfish' actors are indeed a problem on the oceans, for example in the form of fishing vessels that invade the fishing grounds of other peoples and foreign nations and are not held accountable by anyone to any kind of standard in terms of ecosystem impact, overfishing and so on.
It's a genuinely international problem that can hardly be solved by throwing up one's hands and sighing that the oceans are free for everyone and ergo there's nothing that can be done. I believe one could convince a lot of people that there should be limits, I just have to scale up bad behaviors: fishing a species to extinction? pouring toxic waste into the waters? using dynamite for fishing? scraping ocean floors for minerals and turning thriving ecosystems into vast lifeless deserts? huge dragnets that catch and kill everything? Some of these things may not resonate with all people but almost everyone will answer Yes, that should not be allowed, at some point.
> "freedom" to launch rockets into space without necessarily needing permission
Space is another public commons. I will assume it will follow the same trajectory as other public commons. A few decades of abuse, leading to consequences, leading to regulations. But the regulations won't happen until the consequences happens.
- The electromagnetic spectrum - https://www.britannica.com/topic/radio/The-Golden-Age-of-Ame...
- Low altitude airspace - Part 107 Rule
- Fisheries - UNCLOS
The more crowded orbits aren't free. You can't just put a geostationary satellite anywhere you want.
Only the orbits that are more plentiful are free.
There are only like half a dozen countries capable of doing orbital launches. That number is smaller than those nuclear capable.
Permission granted by whom? Agencies and companies that launch satellites are subject only to the laws of the countries in which they are based. And it is not even imaginable to have a NPT-like system where a few "special" countries have the right to launch satellites while the others don't.
That generally falls to the International Telecommunication Union globally, as a satellite without a radio is basically junk.
Then maybe the 4(+) countries that can field anti sat weapons beyond that.
I understand you may want it to fall to the UN, but to the extent that it does it is merely a courtesy.
If someone wants to launch satellites with a radio violating every ITU regulation there is, unless someone is going to knock on their door with a gun, it doesn't mean squat. The buck stops at your nation's capital - if they're okay with what you're doing, you can do it. Everything else is just diplomatic window dressing and doesn't really mean anything at the end of the day.
Who else would approve it?
The country is the atomic unit of global governance. Everything else is just hand-shake deals and "promises." If your country says you can do something, you can do it.
Yeah, it's kind of mind-blowing how much the space game has shifted from international diplomacy to private enterprise with a launch schedule
I agree. I wonder if handing things over to private companies is a way for governments to avoid red tape and shift accountability if something goes wrong.
What would be needed is an international organization formed by at least all nations that have orbital launch capabilities to act as an FAA of sorts for rocket launches in general and putting things into orbit in particular. Earth orbit, and Low Earth Orbit especially so, is a limited resource and the outlook of permanently ruining dark skies globally or turning the skies into a big garbage patch that could make space travel impossible for centuries to come (aka Kessler syndrome) is just too bleak to not do it carefully with sustainability in mind.
> "Earth has 4550 satellites in orbit"
Rapidly obsoleted information. SpaceX alone has > 7500 satellites in orbit. It added 2,300+ satellites in the one year period ending Jun 2025.
> It added 2,300+ satellites in the one year period ending Jun 2025.
Take in account, that a lot of those are replacement sats for the first generations that they are deorbiting already. Do not quote me on this, but its a insane amount (i though it was around 2k) of the first generation that they are deorbiting. If there is a issue, its not the amount of sats in space, but more the insane amount of deorbiting StarLink is doing.
Starlink wanted to put up insane numbers, but a lot of their fights contain a large percentage of replacement sats.
And they are getting bigger ... v1.5 is like 300kg, the v2.0 mini (ironic as its far from mini compared to its predecessors) are 800kg.
So before StarLink launched 60x v1.5's but now they are doing 21x v2.0 Mini's per launch.
The technology has been improving a lot, allowing for a lot more capacity per satellite. Not sure when they start launching v3's but those have like 3x the capacity for inner connects/ground stations and can go up to 1Gbit speeds (compared to the v2's who are again much more capable then multiple v1.5s).
So what we are seeing is less satellites per launch but more capacity per sat. This year is the last year that they are doing mass 1.5 launches, its all now going to the v2.0 "mini" (so 3x less sats).
I love checking out the Starlink launches wikipedia page every so often [1], which is regularly updated. Here's stats as of today:
"As of 31 July 2025:
Satellites launched: 9,314
Satellites failed or deorbited: 1,237
Satellites in orbit: 8,096
Satellites working: 8,077
Satellites operational: 7,040"
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshiel...
Satellite constellations in LEO tend to have short design lives of 5 years or so, but the net change in operating satellites since that 2021 graphic is huge: Starlink alone has over 8000 in orbit now (plus another 1200 deorbited). The later generations of Starlink are bigger, but the launch cadence increases...
The next line after the text you quote reads "(as of 9/1/2021)".
Which was a very outdated number even back when this article was published two years ago
I'm not sure what the exact number was in 2023, but according to [1] it was 6718 at the end of 2022. With that kind of growth, quoting two year old numbers isn't all that helpful
1: https://blog.ucs.org/syoung/how-many-satellites-are-in-space...
Not sure if number of satellites matters so much at this point. As India has already demonstrated that they can launch 100s of them on one rocket. Which means they can very cheaply put them into space as needed.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4226900/Indi...
If you are trying to create satellite internet in low earth orbit (for reduced ping/latency) the satellite moves faster than the earth spins, and the user on the ground loses point to point contact. So there has to be another satellite already over the horizon before the first one goes out of view. Wiki says Starlink sats travel at about 340 miles above the ground.
The easiest alternative to implement is having the satellites in a geostationary orbit so that they are always above a single spot. The altitude necessary for this is higher than 20k miles, and results in very bad ping/latency. Inmarsat is one of these, and I had a chance to use it in the past. It was slow and laggy, as the realities of physics would suggest.
So more satellites means more potential coverage of the globe, or increased capacity over existing coverage regions, or both. It seems very important.
The Indian satellites in the article weighed on average around 6 kilograms. A starlink satellite weighs 227 kg. You can put more telecom equipment in 227 kg than in 6kg. A better metric than #of satellites is probably total mass of satellites, to make broad comparisons more meaningful.
This really isn't all that much if you pause to consider it. For example. Lets take the larger possible number of 7500 plus 2,300 plus the 4,550 satellites noted up to 2021. That's a total of just under 15,000 satellites. Most of those are fairly small objects, at the most about the size of a typical mini-van, with most being quite a bit smaller than that.
Now, all of this is spread over a three-dimensional topography that's much larger than the total surface area of the Earth, and because their orbits are, as mentioned, three-dimensionally occupying various altitudes, the size of the total topography they move through is enormously larger than just one single surface area in square kilometers of a single hypothetical sphere X km above the Earth's surface. In the least case, even if all existing orbital satellites were stationed at the lowest possible orbital altitude, that's still quite a bit bigger than the 509 600 000 square km of the Earth's total surface. (too lazy to calculate the specific increment in this moment)
Across all of that, just 15,000 objects that are individually smaller than your average family sedan.
For comparison, the island of Manhattan has approximately 116,000 buildings crammed into it. If you spread those more or less equi-distantly from each other across the whole of the Earth's surface, water or air, there'd still be a tremendous amount of empty space between them. That's nearly 10 times as many objects individually much larger than any human satellite, across a much smaller surface area than what's occupied by our orbital satellites.
(Yes, I know we also have a shit-load of other inert junk zipping around up there at tens of thousands of KM per hour, but even if that stuff, most of which is very tiny, were included, we're still talking about an enormous amount of empty space between objects)
But apart from all the other stuff you mention, you’re missing an important point: these things move. And unless all objects are synchronized (which they are not) they occupy a whole orbit, not only their actual volume. If two orbits intersect, the objects occupying those will eventually collide.
Therefore, they occupy much more volume.
Yes. This is the idea behind Kessler Syndrome - that the accumulation of clutter in Earth orbit could lead to an "ablation cascade" as more and more things collide and more and more debris is created from those collisions leading to Earth orbit becoming too hazardous to traverse.
"A 1 kg object impacting at 10 km/s, for example, is probably capable of catastrophically breaking up a 1,000 kg spacecraft if it strikes a high-density element in the spacecraft. In such a breakup, numerous fragments larger than 1 kg would be created." https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/library/a-technical-asses...
The dimensionality of usable orbits is much less than 3.
For example all the GEO satellites are positioned along a 1D line.
I believe I described it badly or you misunderstood me then. What I was referring to in my mention of three-dimensionality is that the area in which all of them orbit isn't a single flat plane over a sphere shape. It's actually several flat planes layered on top of each other, with an obviously ever greater surface area the higher you go. Thus you have LEO, MEO and GEO satellites all sharing orbital space but at different heights so to speak. I'm aware that any given satellite generally flies along a fixed altitude (though as far as I know their latitude along that altitude can shift enormously)
I suppose each satellite has its orbit defined by the elliptical path (4 parameters). Like for GEO you can have many satellites in a single elliptical path.
You can also probably have different satellites on different ellipses whose paths intersect with each other, but the timing is such that they never collide.
I suppose it's quite complex in reality!
What you say is important of course, and it's what makes me less than sure in my assessment. It was after all more of a mental exercise in appreciating just how vast an area of space this relatively tiny quantity of objects is spread across.
To give one further perspective example here: a single large bulk container ship can carry up to 8,500 car-sized units.
This means that even if every single one of the maybe 15,000 satellites in orbit were the size of a car (most of them are much smaller actually), all together, they'd fill no more than the storage spaces of two bulk container ships with lots of room to spare at that.
This, spread over a multi-layered area as vast as our orbital space, means that even with their constantly moving at incredible speeds, and all the junk out there scattered between the satellites themselves, there's an enormous amount of emptiness between it all mitigating against impacts being very likely or frequent at all.
After all, of the 8,070 or so Starlink satellites in orbit right now, there's little mention of more than a few having been knocked out by debris in orbit. It seems that solar storms are their much bigger worry and cause of mishaps.
As the saying goes, space is huge, sometimes more than our brains can easily comprehend. This applies even in the comparatively tiny orbital regions of it that we use daily.
The mental exercise is fine for realising that satellites don't look as big as pictures of satellites in graphics, it's just missing the point that if you don't want to hit a 20cm x 20cm x 20cm cube that moves at 17,500 mph and has slow and limited capability to adjust that movement you need to allow it quite a bit more space, and be able to predict its movement accurately relative to yours. Especially if any collision means thousands of pieces of shrapnel that continue to move at 17500mph for decades or more, whilst potentially being too small to track but large enough to do a lot of damage.
Trains take up a negligible fraction of the mileage of the lines they operate on and rarely cross other lines, but signalling is still critical.
All of these are useful things to keep in mind of course, and they're why I put forth my consideration as a thought experiment for perspective, not so much as an absolute assertion. Orbital space is complicated, and the the ramifications of accidents are extremely unique compared to those that apply in a terrestrial context, but I still stand by my point about it being absurdly big enough that a sense of proportion is needed in worrying about something like Kessler syndrome.
To those downvoting a completely innocuous comment like this and my other replies below, which simply put forth a thought experiment for the sake of debate, without asserting anything at all controversial: Grow an adult brain, no? idiotic as the downvote feature is in general, one would at least assume that the self-professed "intellectually above-average" readers of a site like this would use it better than 12-year-old rage-lords on a 4chan thread.
Is there something like https://www.flightradar24.com for satellites?
Would be kind of interesting to build a “live” visualization of objects in earths orbit. But this would require accurate live data of those objects. Probably nothing that companies would publish.
On the other hand side: once the object and its orbit is identified, positions could be calculated…
Does anyone know more?
https://satellitemap.space/
Another interesting site already featured on Hacker News.
https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/
i didn't know that one and now i'm forwarding it to everybody, love the streetview thing
https://stuffin.space also shows debree, and will show orbits when you click on objects.
https://www.heavens-above.com/
https://www.space-track.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Designator
Unlike aircraft, satellites have VERY predictable movements, with the occasional small maneuver.
https://satellitetracker3d.com/
> Did you know that we provide flexible and robust data acquisition hardware and software that can be used for testing satellites, rockets, airplanes, or helicopters in the air, in space, or on the ground? Our solutions are used and trusted by leading aerospace companies. Contact us to learn more.
Interesting article for a sales pitch. Nicely done.
Here's a related long-form article with more recent figures (and narratives),
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/07/23/world/asia/st... ("This Was Supposed to Be the Year China Started Catching Up With SpaceX")
If you want to avoid paywall - https://archive.ph/95S2U
For anyone interested in current data like this, Jonathan McDowell maintains GCAT which is a General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects (and does so fastidiously).
https://www.planet4589.org/space/gcat/index.html
Be warned if you planning to ingest this dataset, the dates are fun =)
It's interesting that the "E" in GEO, LEO, MEO, HEO is short for three different things: https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Ty...
It looks like (if I've parsed right) every one of them stands for "Earth", except that HEO alone can also be overloaded three ways (high-earth, highly-elliptical, and highly-eccentric).
This is unimportant, but: a site:nasa.gov search shows all three "HEO" acronyms in common use, there; and even Wikipedia abbreviates it inconsistently across entries[0-2].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_Earth_orbit ("A medium Earth orbit (MEO) is an Earth-centered orbit with an altitude above a low Earth orbit (LEO) and below a high Earth orbit (HEO)")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_elliptical_orbit ("A highly elliptical orbit (HEO) is")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Earth_orbit ("In this article, the non-standard abbreviation of HEO is used for high Earth orbit[2]")
[edit]: I overlooked the abbreviation of "geostationary equatorial orbit" for GEO, which brings it up to four different "E's"!
The phrase "highly elliptical" is one where I know exactly what they mean but the more I think about it the more wrong it seems. It should be "Highly eccentric orbit".
All shapes which satisfy {(x,y)| x^2/a^2 + y^2/b^2 = 1} for fixed values of a,b in R are elliptical. Something is either elliptical or not - it's not a matter of degree. A circle is just as elliptical as a more eccentric ellipse in the same way that a square is just as rectangular as a more elongated rectangle.
> geostationary equatorial orbit
I thought GEO stood for Geostationary Earth Orbit, since a geostationary orbit must be equatorial anyway. But actually "Earth" would also be redundant, since "Geo-" already stands for Earth.
I understand it's both, but "equatorial" is more precise to distinguish it from GSO, a non-equatorial [g]eo[s]ynchronous [o]rbit. Otherwise, they would both be "GEO".
LEO is Low Earth Orbit
MEO is Medium Earth Orbit
The E is short for the same thing in this case.
GEO for Geostationary and HEO for High-Eccentricity are interesting, though.
MEO is Middle Earth Orbit. We have to keep an eye on what Gandalf is up to.
That orbit has only really been possible since the sinking of Numenor. Better make use of it now that we can.
SubEarthOrbit for the dwarves
…but they orbit too deep, and too greedily.
It is the most common letter, but I agree that is funny.
The article may be from 2023, but the data is for 2021.
At the rate of Space X littering the sky with them, the 2021 statistics are somewhat irrelevant.
Unfortunately, not relevant anymore. Some information is from before 2021 on this page.
Pretty wild to think that over a third of all the satellites orbiting Earth belong to one private company. Space used to feel like the domain of governments and sci-fi
That was a few years ago. More like two thirds today.
Does that mean that the entire EU has no military satellites at all? (Or maybe like 10 from France's CNES, and that's it?)
Europe is a more finite geospatial target. Fewer resources required. France has already stated they have the capability to fill the gap for Ukraine for up-to-date movements along the 1,000+ km line. They are currently working on the next generation program, IRIS, with a target date of 2027.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIS%C2%B2
https://europeanspaceflight.com/ariane-6-successfully-delive...
Those Swedish military satellites are just kept extremely secret.
Countries like Germany, Spain, France and Italy does have a number of satellites and it doesn't seem to be specified what they are doing. It would be weird if none of those where not military.
Stats that are based only on the number of satellites can be very misleading as they don't differentiate between a 5 ton comm sat and an 1 kg cubesat.
How relevant is that for orbit occupancy?
A 1 unit CubeSat is 10cm³ and max 2kg / unit, occupying a particular location in an LEO orbit at 28,000 km/h / 17,000 mph doesn’t want to be bumping in to anything either.
Weight is irrelevant. They will all tear through anything like butter and break apart into thousands of pieces in a conjunction.
The amount of aluminum in a satellite matters because of the effect it has on the atmosphere when it burns up during reentry.
Just to point that we don't actually know how important it is.
It can be completely irrelevant, or it can be something that must be regulated ASAP. Nobody has any idea.
(Well, we have an upper bond in that current numbers are still not an immediate problem.)
I would have to suspect there are more US NRO ones that aren't listed. Misty and her descendants would like a word.
Dewesoft is only ranking the top 50 owners, so their stats may be wrong or misleading for the others.
Austria, for example, is listed as having only 1 satellite, but they have at least 4 according to the UCS Satellite Database.
It would also be interesting to learn more about launch locations and how countries near the equator can benefit from this booming sector.
So about 11000 units in the low orbit in 2025 and thats a mix of commercial and state satellites. I wonder how the traffic and distribution being governed
LEO traffic is primarily coordinated through the ITU for frequency allocation and conjunction alerts from the US Space Force's 18th Space Defense Squadron, though there's no binding international framework for orbital slot management.
Poland have 10-20 satelites 2 army and many optical satelites , bocian, heveliusz, etc.
*that we know of
Off-topic but wow, what a nice, concise and no-bullshit cookie banner. I wish everyone's cookie banner was like this, the web would have been a better place! Seriously.
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Anyone having that many satellites in space is scary, a madman having them is insane.
Madman seems better than a con-man. All those satellites for an unnecessary service that could never become profitable...
Is this the node_modules/js ecosystem for space? 7k+ satellites for a service that Viasat and others can do with ~10. Supposedly Starlink has better ping, but as it's still unusable for gaming, it doesn't appear nearly as beneficial.
Leaked internal documents show that last year, Starlink made $72M net income on $2.7B in revenue.[1] Their revenue growth rate is ≈90% year over year. They're spending most of that on expansion (paying SpaceX for more launches, manufacturing more/better satellites, and manufacturing terminals). If they wanted to, they could scale back these expenditures and rake in the money. But long-term, they stand to gain more if they spend their revenues on ways to grow their business. Their customer base has increased by 30% since those financial statements came out, so their finances are most likely in even better shape now.
For comparison, last year Viasat had $4.3B in revenue and lost $1B. This year their revenue has been flat. They lost revenue in communication services (probably from Starlink) and gained revenue in military contracts.[2]
1. https://www.scribd.com/document/886692980/GI-2139325374
2. https://investors.viasat.com/static-files/c89c3424-4ad3-4fe2...