In the six months to November 30, 2025, SpaceX’s Starlink satellites made 148,696 collision-avoidance maneuvers. The company reported the figure to the FCC. Low Earth orbit has become that crowded.
The debris behind it comes in three size bands, according to the European Space Agency’s Space Debris Office and the U.S. Space Surveillance Network. About 54,000 objects are larger than 10 centimeters, and any one of them could destroy an operating satellite or crewed spacecraft. About 1.2 million pieces measure between 1 and 10 centimeters, big enough to punch through shielding. Roughly 140 million particles run from 1 millimeter to 1 centimeter. Too small to track, they can still damage solar panels, optics and thermal systems.
Speed does the harm. Objects in low Earth orbit travel at about 7.8 kilometers per second, or 17,500 mph. At that pace, ESA says, even a 1-centimeter fragment hits a satellite with the force of a hand grenade.
Where it comes from
Spent rocket upper stages, dead satellites, collision and explosion fragments, lens caps, paint flakes and solid rocket motor slag all end up in orbit. Two events account for thousands of the trackable pieces still up there: China’s 2007 anti-satellite test, which destroyed the Fengyun-1C weather satellite, and the 2009 collision between Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251.
In 1978, NASA scientist Donald Kessler described the worst case. Each collision makes hundreds or thousands of new fragments, which raise the odds of the next collision. ESA’s 2025 Space Environment Report warns that debris would keep growing even with no further launches, because new fragmentation outpaces natural re-entry. It would not happen overnight. The degradation would unfold over decades.
Tracking and cleanup
The U.S. Space Fence radar, operational since 2020, and commercial providers such as LeoLabs, ExoAnalytic and Privateer are sharpening the picture of what is up there. Better tracking of small objects in low Earth orbit would produce more precise conjunction predictions and fewer unnecessary maneuvers.
Removal is moving from theory to hardware. Astroscale’s ADRAS-J, launched in February 2024, took the first close-up images of a large piece of debris, a Japanese H-IIA upper stage, from about 50 meters. The Tokyo company’s roadmap includes docking and deorbiting missions in 2027 and 2028. ESA’s ClearSpace-1 mission lost its original target when another piece of debris struck it in 2023. The target is now ESA’s own PROBA-1 satellite, with launch planned for 2029.
Rules lag behind
The long-standing international guideline gives satellites in low Earth orbit 25 years to deorbit after their missions end. In 2022, the FCC cut that to 5 years for U.S.-licensed satellites. In January 2026, though, the FAA withdrew a parallel proposal for upper stages, saying it wanted to consider comments on costs and its legal authority. Operators therefore face tight deorbit deadlines while the rockets that carry them up may not.
Only one liability claim under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty has ever been settled. In 1981 the Soviet Union paid Canada C$3 million over radioactive debris from Cosmos 954.
