Skip to content
Back to all posts

Tossed in Space 

NASA astronaut Chris Wilson photographed what was likely orbital debris reentering Earth's atmosphere in April.

NASA astronaut Chris Williams, aboard the International Space Station for Expedition 74, photographed what was likely orbital debris reentering Earth’s atmosphere in April – astro_chrisw, Instagram

 

Satellite pieces, rocket parts, and other debris are crowding low-Earth orbit.

Flotsam. Jetsam. Detritus. Debris. Earth’s low orbit is filling with rocket and satellite fragments—“space junk,” colloquially. Observers agree there’s a lot of it, though its definition is wide.

With space back in the headlines, courtesy of NASA’s April 2026 Artemis II mission, space junk stories have also amassed, floating through newsfeeds like debris through space. This junking began in 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite, touching off the 1950s–1960s US–USSR space race.

European Space Agency statistics show that there is now 2,700 dead satellites and 54,000 larger-than-a-golf-ball objects orbiting Earth. Popular Science magazine reports that millions of centimeter-and-larger objects and about 130 million tinier space trash fragments are orbiting Earth. Acta Astronautica, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, reported in January 2026 that objects stuck in low Earth orbit have increased 76% from 2019 (13,741) to 2025 (24,185). The US has likely worsened space junk proliferation, having launched 3,708 objects into space in 2025, up from 984 in 2020.

And once they’re up there, these things tend to stay…until they don’t. The European Union Space magazine Horizon reported that although some space satellites burn up after falling back to Earth, others can stay suspended for years, or decades. As April 2026 ended, Chris Williams, a NASA astronaut aboard the International Space Station photographed what was probably a flaming space junk fragment zipping by and disintegrating as it entered Earth’s atmosphere. “It was quite a light show!” Williams wrote on Instagram.

And with this much junk, crashing is expected. Hugh Lewis, an astronautics professor at the University of Birmingham in England, told Space.com that there is a 10% chance that some of those orbiting objects collide within a year. Some efforts to clear this flotsam have created more mess. In 2021, for example, a Russian missile launched to destroy an old satellite created 1,500 new trackable bits of orbital wreckage. In 2009, two Russian satellites—one active, one decommissioned—collided, creating 2,000-plus new pieces of debris.

Experts have said a chain of debris collisions, called Kessler syndrome, could spark a hard-to-stop chain reaction that could make large areas impassible. (Donald Kessler, a researcher in NASA’s Environmental Effects Office at Houston’s Johnson Space Center described these potential collisions in a 1978 paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research.)

Call for cleanup

In 2023, the Federal Aviation Administration, under President Joe Biden, proposed shortening the window for operators to remove defunct satellites from orbit from 25 years to 5, arguing that the unchecked accumulation of orbital debris would needlessly clutter orbits for human spaceflight and for communications, weather, and global positioning system satellites.

The plan would move upper stages of launched projectiles, mainly rockets, to a “graveyard orbit” and send the upper stages on an Earth-escape orbit. When it made the rule, the FAA said clearing space clutter would mitigate risk on Earth, because some space debris had fallen to Earth every day for the previous 50 years.

If satellite junk wasn’t enough, there’s junk from rockets, which break apart in flight. But in March 2026, President Donald Trump’s administration retreated from a mandated 25-year window for removing rocket parts from Earth’s orbit. Explaining his rationale, Trump issued an executive order in August 2025, arguing that too many rules hamper the US’ space exploration. “Inefficient permitting processes discourage investment and innovation, limiting the ability of US companies to lead in global space markets,” the order read. “Overly complex environmental and other licensing and permitting regulations slow down commercial space launches and infrastructure development.”

News outlets noted that this move would benefit commercial space operators, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, companies whose founders have both donated to Trump, with Musk donating at least $250 million to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign and Bezos donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and spending $75 million through Amazon on the Melania documentary film.

Trump’s space rules rollback dismayed Ewan Wright, a University of British Columbia doctoral candidate and Outer Space Institute junior fellow. “Instead of requiring companies to responsibly dispose of these upper stages, the US has decided to roll the dice on a person or a plane getting hit by falling debris,” Wright told ProPublica, adding that US rocket companies in the past five years have abandoned 41 upper-stage rockets in orbit.

Scientific sweep

Scientists and science-minded companies have been exploring how to mitigate all of this space junk. Horizon reported that through a 2025 project called Dexter, scientists from the UK, Estonia, Sweden, and Spain are determining whether the old satellites, made from aluminum and other useful materials, can perhaps be disassembled and reassembled into new frames to support in-use satellites. A more complicated idea would be converting the old satellites into fuel. Robotic arms could catch the satellites, use lasers could cut them open, and the aluminum could then be converted to plasma to power ion thrusters, spacecraft-propelling engines running on charged particles.

Leonard Felicetti, lead on Dexter and an associate space engineering professor at the UK’s Cranfield University, told Horizon, “We are cluttering space with new objects. What we want to do is to try and reuse the material that is already there.”

In 2021, Japan’s Astroscale introduced ELSA, short for End of Life Services, a spacecraft that uses magnets to snatch up defunct satellites and clear them from Earth’s orbit. The company’s UK unit, Astroscale Ltd., said in March that it will use Isar Aerospace to launch a demonstration mission to capture a decommissioned Eutelsat OneWeb satellite. Space News said the launch is slated for Astroscale’s 2028 fiscal year, which begins in May 2027. The European Space Agency, in May 2022, gave Astroscale $16 million toward the launch.

Even with these projects, space junk will likely be a lingering problem. Acknowledging this, Purdue University researcher Carolin Frueh and doctoral student Pavithra Ravi have used machine learning to predict collision probabilities for low-Earth orbit satellites. Frueh is also researching how to use sunlight to detect satellites’ physical orientation in space, which could help get them out of orbit before they get stuck and become junk.

Frueh has said the method would be cheaper than radar; it would deliver information about any satellites that reflect light toward a telescope on the ground. This would be true however far the satellites are from Earth. “The better we know about the pieces we’re dealing with—what’s the shape, how much rotation they have—the better we can execute missions to remove those pieces,” Frueh said.

***

If you have ideas floating around ready for launch, technical copy that could use fine-tuning, or a project that just needs a final polish, Nova Arc Content Co. stands ready. We can write, edit, consult, proofread, format, and partner to deliver impactful, meaningful work. Connect with us to see how we can help move your words forward.

 

 

SOURCES

more posts