The public catalog of tracked objects in orbit passed 29,790 this February, maintained by the U.S. Space Force through its 18th Space Defense Squadron. The breakdown: 8,377 active payloads, 5,214 dead ones, 3,892 spent rocket bodies, 10,204 pieces of fragmentation debris. Tracked, though, means seen. OrbVeil, a debris-statistics reference drawing on Space-Track.org, ESA’s Space Debris Office and NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office, estimates an invisible remainder of some 100 million fragments smaller than 10 cm, traveling at 7-15 km/s.
Where the Junk Sits
Low Earth orbit holds roughly 22,400 tracked objects, about three quarters of the catalog. No altitude band is more congested than 500-600 km, a record OrbVeil credits to Starlink deployment; SpaceX operates over 5,800 active satellites there as of February 2026, with approved plans for 42,000. Higher up, the 780-820 km sun-synchronous band carries China’s 2007 Fengyun-1C anti-satellite test legacy, more than 3,400 trackable fragments at creation, around 2,700 still circling. The geosynchronous belt counts about 1,460 tracked objects, near 580 active satellites, some 470 dead ones left on-station or drifting, and 410 rocket bodies. IADC mitigation guidelines say push defunct GEO satellites into a “graveyard orbit” 300+ km above the belt. Compliance, OrbVeil notes, is inconsistent.
Who Put It There
Russia and the Soviet Union lead with 9,840 tracked objects, 33.0% of the total, against 8,950 for the United States at 30.0% and 6,420 for China at 21.5%. The Chinese share jumped in 2007, when Fengyun-1C created 21% of all trackable LEO debris in one afternoon. The breakup ledger runs on: the Iridium 33 and COSMOS 2251 collision of February 2009 left 2,296 trackable fragments, about 1,900 still in orbit; the Cosmos 1408 ASAT test of November 2021 added 1,500+, some 1,480 remaining; the Cosmos 2421 explosion of March 2008 scattered 509, with roughly 470 up there still.
The Part Nobody Can See
Tracking has a floor near 10 cm in low orbit. Below it, a 2025 AMOS technical library paper by six Advanced Space engineers lays out the problem: in ESA’s estimate just 36,860 space objects, under 1% of the debris total, stay in regular maintenance inside the Space Surveillance Network catalog. IARPA’s SINTRA program is one of several efforts chasing smaller objects with new sensors and machine learning, but detections are fleeting. The measurements come as “Too Short Arcs”, spans covering a small slice of an orbit, too thin for an accurate initial orbit estimate, which pushes the field toward probabilistic methods built on admissible regions.
What Screening Shows
The daily arithmetic is unforgiving. In OrbVeil’s February 9, 2026 screening, the average conjunction relative velocity ran 8.2 km/s and the fastest crossing hit 11.55 km/s, the kind of near-perpendicular approach that leaves the least warning time. The same run flagged 174 co-located formations, which are satellites flying in intentional patterns, not threats. What “Close Approach” means at these speeds is simple: a 1 km miss closes in 0.1 seconds.
Sources
- Space Debris by the Numbers: 2026 Statistics and Trends | OrbVeil
- Tracking Small Debris Using Probabilistic Methods – AMOS Technical Library
