Space flights get a lot of attention — but only if they have humans on board. If they are only carrying cargo, most of us cannot be bothered.
But Lucas C.H., a self-declared space enthusiast and prolific poster on X (over 25,000 posts), cares a great deal. He posted a photo of a SpaceX rocket, ready to launch on November 26, its payload fully exposed. He was able to identify quite a few satellites that compose the payload, which are, as we speak, being placed into low Earth and other orbits.
Hardware FYI, a newsletter for hardware startups, reports that the Falcon 9 by SpaceX carried a total of 140 satellites, “a mix of Earth-imaging satellites, small national programs and a few ‘space tugs’ that carry other satellites to custom orbits.”
- Highest on the towering stack are larger Earth-observation payloads like Formosat-8A
- Middle: a dense mix of commercial SAR satellites, radio-sensing spacecraft and a few orbital-transfer buses.
- Low: Planet’s imaging satellites alongside clusters of European and Asian cubesats [cube satellites]
Space cargo carries with it its own seeds of destruction. There really is no escaping gravity for all this hardware in low Earth orbit. When it stops working, it becomes space junk. It all falls down. On our heads perhaps.
In the past five years, space launch cadence has increased dramatically. Makers of mega-satellite constellations (Starlink, OneWeb, Kuiper, GuoWang, etc.) plan on adding tens of thousands of satellites to low-Earth orbit.
The Falcon 9 rocket, made and launched by SpaceX, carries between 5,000 and 8,000 kg of cargo. SpaceX, the most active rocket launcher in the world, has had over 558 successful launches of the Falcon 9 in its 15 years of existence. 138 of them were in 2024, establishing a new record according to NASA Spaceflight.
Just 5,000 kg of offloaded payload and a hundred launches would put half a million kg, or 550 tons, of eventual space junk up there.
Traffic Jam
NASA does its best to track space junk with its Orbital Debris Program. To date, the agency has accounted for more than 36,000 pieces of debris larger than 10 cm and over a million pieces in the 1–10 cm range by last summer. The smallest of them can create havoc, disable a spacecraft or worse, an astronaut. Even if no satellites were launched from here on (an unlikely scenario, for sure), the collision risk will keep increasing due to the number of fragments from previous collisions, warned the European Space Agency in a 2023 report.
Death and destruction are not the only risks. Astronomers are getting increasingly irritated by the light contamination from reflective objects up there. A 2024 analysis by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory team found that satellite streaks already appear in over 20% of twilight survey images. They worry about what would happen to visual ground-based space observation if this keeps up.
Radio astronomy faces a similar challenge. The International Astronomical Union issued a warning in 2023 that large constellations emit “unintended radio interference” even outside allocated bands.
The U.S. Department of Commerce, to which falls the unenviable task of playing space traffic cop, practically threw up its hands in a 2024 NOAA/Office of Space Commerce report. No global authority exists to enforce debris-mitigation practices, or end-of-life disposal and collision-avoidance notifications remain voluntary across operators.
Can the United Nations step up to fill the void? Spacecraft proliferation and space junk has indeed appeared on UN radar. They’ve referred to orbital space as a “threatened commons.”
I suppose if you are dealing with ethnic cleansing and famines in Sudan, millions of refugees and displaced people in large parts of the Earth, war and famine, the UN has to be more concerned with what is happening on the Earth’s surface rather than above it.