The new Space Race II, A sea of debris

As I mentioned in my previous article about the transformation of the space industry, we’re witnessing an unprecedented boom in space activity. With more than two launches per week globally and over 250 launches in 2024 alone, there’s clearly a new race for space driven by satellite constellations, commercial interests, and political sovereignty.

While I find this expansion exciting and undoubtedly a win for humanity, pushing our knowledge and capabilities ever further, some troubling questions are emerging. How are we going to manage the debris from all those launches and aging satellites? What about the environmental impact? And if space launchers are tools for state sovereignty, why is Europe struggling to keep pace?

I plan to address each question in separate posts, but today I want to focus on what I believe is the most immediate threat: space debris.

The Scale of the Problem

The numbers are staggering when you really look at them. We currently have approximately 54,000 pieces of debris larger than 10 centimeters actively tracked in orbit, with an estimated 1,200,000 pieces between 1-10 centimeters that we can’t reliably monitor. Each piece of debris, when hitting a spacecraft at speeds exceeding 7,500 meter per second, can create thousands more fragments.

This scenario has long fascinated scientists, who analyze the possibility of reaching a breaking point: a cascading effect of destruction known as Kessler Syndrome that could render most spacecraft in orbit useless. Worse, it could potentially prevent us from sending more missions, effectively trapping us on Earth.

How We Got Here

For decades, space debris wasn’t really considered a serious issue. Leaving large upper stages in long-lasting orbits was common practice—out of sight, out of mind. With time, most space agencies realized the potential catastrophe brewing above our heads and started taking measures: deorbiting upper stages, planning end-of-life procedures for satellites, and implementing debris mitigation guidelines.

Everything should be improving then, right? Sadly, not.

The Weaponization Factor

With rising geopolitical tensions and China’s expanding space capabilities, we’re once again seeing debris numbers explode, literally. In November 2021, Russia destroyed one of their own aging satellites with a ground-based missile, creating over 1,500 trackable pieces of debris. That’s still short of the 40,000 pieces China generated 13 years prior with a similar test. The reason? A show of force without any real provocation, demonstrating their ability to blind enemy satellites in wartime.

These destructive tests represent what I see as the most irresponsible acts in space history. Unlike terrestrial weapons testing, space debris doesn’t respect national boundaries—it threatens every nation’s space assets equally.

The Constellation Explosion

Add to this the multiplication of Low Earth Orbit satellites. With the deployment of Starlink, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, and dozens of other planned constellations, satellite numbers have increased by over 300% in the last five years, from roughly 3,500 active satellites to more than 11,700 today in low earth orbit. Industry projections suggest we could see 50,000+ active satellites by 2030.

I find it remarkable that SpaceX alone has launched more satellites in the past four years than humanity deployed in the previous six decades combined.

The Perfect Storm

These two factors, deliberate debris creation and exponential satellite growth, are creating what I believe is a perfect storm for cascading collisions. The mathematics are sobering: each collision doubles the debris count in that orbital region, and with more targets in increasingly crowded orbits, the probability of chain reactions grows exponentially.

What particularly concerns me is that while space programs remain intensely national subjects, their impacts are inherently global. A cascading debris event triggered by one nation’s activities would affect everyone’s access to space.

The Urgency of International Cooperation

I believe we need serious international discussions about the impact of each country’s endeavors beyond our planet, and we need them now. The current regulatory framework is a patchwork of voluntary guidelines and national policies, and is woefully inadequate for managing what has become a truly global commons.

The irony isn’t lost on me: as we’re achieving unprecedented cooperation in space through projects like the International Space Station, we’re simultaneously creating conditions that could end that cooperation by making space itself inaccessible.

The series continue. In my next article, I’ll explore the environmental impact of our space activities and examine whether our rush to the stars is coming at the expense of our home planet.