The great space waste

From chaotic collisions to depletion of the ozone layer, the thousands of satellites in orbit around Earth have the potential to wreak havoc

- Shaoni Bhattacharya

'Since the start of the space age, we've had a throwaway culture a bit like plastics in the ocean," said Nick Shave, managing director of Astroscale UK, an in-orbit servicing company headquartered in Japan.

Getting a satellite into orbit around the Earth used to be a big deal. From the launch of the first, Sputnik, in 1957, as it became easier and cheaper to put satellites into space, the numbers have boomed. In 2022, there were about 6,000 and by 2030, one estimate suggests there will be nearly 60,000 satellites in orbit around our planet.

Look up on a clear night now and you may well see a bright train of dots traversing the sky. These are part of SpaceX's "megaconstellation" of satellites, Starlink, which offers increased access to broadband communication across the world.

But regulations on how people behave in space are piecemeal and the main international law, the UN's 1967 Outer Space treaty, is more than 50 years old.

There's now a huge amount of junk, or space debris, in orbit. Almost 37,000 objects more than 10cm in size are being tracked by space surveillance networks, according to the European Space Agency (Esa) figures for September.

"That stuff's dangerous," said John Janka, global government affairs and regulatory chief officer at the communications company Viasat, who is based in Washington DC. "But there's also, according to Esa, more than im pieces of debris between 1cm and 10cm that are lethal and non-trackable ... It means you can't see it, you can't avoid it, and today you can't shield your satellite against it."