Clashes, colonisation, and confronting space junk

A new arms race in satellite internet is crowding out Low Earth Orbit. What will we do with all the space junk that's building up?

- Shweta Taneja

At a stargazing party in San Jose, I looked up and spotted a star in the sky. Excited, I pointed it out to a friend, only to get a shrug back. It wasn't a planet; it was a satellite. I spotted another. Satellite again.

Not surprising. A little research back home made me realise that Low Earth Orbit (LEO) has filled up with so many satellites recently that even astronomers are confusing them with asteroids. In just five years, from 2020, there have been 11,951 launches to space, most of them to LEO-the space in the 500-1000 kilometre altitude above Earth. It's this altitude that houses satellites used for remote sensing, weather forecasting, spying, and satellite internet. It's also the altitude best suited for housing astronauts. The International Space Station is here, and it is the location for everyone's recent favourite-space tourism.

LEO is the most coveted real estate in space

When it comes to orbits around Earth, LEO is the new gold rush.

The space industry has grown more in the last 63 months than in the previous 63 years when the first rocket was launched to space in 1957, according to data from Pixalytics.com. There are 14,904 satellites in space and about 20,895 total objects that have been launched to space since 1957 - 56% percent were sent in the last 66 months, most of them to LEO!

It's not weather data or spying but satellite internet that's driving this boom. The US holds the first mover advantage. SpaceX's Starlink internet network has more than 7,600 satellites in LEO thanks to its technology which can successfully reuse launch vehicles. The company now routinely reuses Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, allowing it to launch dozens of satellites each year. They plan to have 40,000 satellites up in space by 2030.