Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Elon Musk’s race to dominate our planet’s orbit with his constellations of satellites is creating tons of space junk — enough, in fact, for us to start looking.
According to Smithsonian astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, there are now one or two of these Starlink satellites returning to Earth every day, he said recently. EarthSky. And that number, McDowell warned, will only continue to climb.
These alarming statistics highlight concerns over the rapid population of the planet’s low Earth orbit with expendable satellites. Musk’s SpaceX has launched thousands up there using its reusable rockets since 2019, with more than 8,000 currently in service.
With these efforts accelerating in recent years, SpaceX has launched more than 2,000 satellites in 2025 alone. Meanwhile, its competitors are racing to catch up with their own satellite internet service, with Amazon launching plans to deploy more than 3,200 with its first batch launched earlier this year.
“With all the constellations deployed, we expect about 30,000 satellites in low Earth orbit (Starlink, Amazon Kuiper, others) and perhaps an additional 20,000 satellites 1,000 km (620 miles) from Chinese systems,” McDowell said. EarthSky.
In other words, low Earth orbit is quickly becoming more and more populated, which means lots of satellite casualties. One reason these phenomena occur so frequently is that Starlink’s satellites have a short lifespan, around five years. After that, they are guided to Earth, where they are expected to burn up as they re-enter the atmosphere.
All these incinerated satellites worry scientists about the pollution they cause by releasing metals into the stratosphere. One study speculates that this could trigger a chain reaction that would devastate the ozone layer.
“So far the answers have ranged from ‘it’s too small to be a problem’ to ‘we’re already screwed,’” McDowell said. The register. “But the uncertainty is great enough that there is already a possibility that we could damage the upper atmosphere.”
And air pollution could soon be the least of our worries. In a 2023 report, the Federal Aviation Administration warned that by 2035, some 28,000 fragments of Starlink satellites could survive re-entry each year, increasing the risk of a person on the ground being struck and killed by space debris — once considered an astronomical improbability — to a staggering 61 percent each year.
As it stands, Earth is about to be bombarded by five satellite reentries a day for the foreseeable future, McDowell warned. But that’s not even the worst case scenario. McDowell fears that if satellite constellations become too crowded, they could give rise to a disastrous chain reaction called Kessler syndrome, in which a few collisions between satellites spin out of control and create even more space debris, potentially trapping humanity under a swirling vortex of orbital shrapnel. SpaceX’s satellites are low enough that they are unlikely to survive the time needed for this stunt to occur, but its dominance there could force competitors to higher orbits where their craft could take decades, or even centuries, to deorbit.
What if a whole series of satellites were wiped out all at once by a solar storm? It’s not impossible, as research has shown that satellites fall from the sky more frequently during a period of volatile solar activity called solar maximum. All things considered, we have reached a point where we can no longer push the space debris problem under the rug.
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