Collisions, colonisation, and a fight to control space junk

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

At a star-gazing 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.

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. (Shutterstock)

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,