Imagine a red-hot piece of metal the size of a soda can screaming through your roof at thousands of miles an hour just as you’re sitting down to dinner. Having a chunk of dead satellite crash into your house may seem unlikely, but NASA confirms that a manufactured meteorite plummeted through the roof and two floors of a Florida residence on March 8. According to Ted Muelhaupt, a consultant with the Aerospace Corporation, a government-funded R&D center in El Segundo, California, the location and timing of the impact were consistent with Aerospace’s predictions for a spent battery pack that had been jettisoned from the International Space Station in 2021. While one person was home at the time, no one was hurt.
Since Russia fired Sputnik into space in 1957, the world’s governments and, more recently, companies have launched approximately 18,200 satellites into orbit around Earth, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who catalogs every single one of them on his website, planet4589.org. Those satellites range in size from a toaster oven to a dump truck (weighing 10 tons or more)—not to mention the International Space Station itself—and are accompanied by thousands of other objects like spent rocket boosters and debris as small as a paint fleck, plus still millions more that are smaller than that.
For a place called space, it’s getting mighty crowded up there. But while there’s clearly some danger associated with space junk falling to Earth, the risk is relatively low. Most reentering debris burns up in the atmosphere, and what doesn’t—an average of one piece a day over the past 50 years, according to NASA—almost always falls safely into oceans or desolate areas (which is most of the planet, after all).
The real danger lies overhead, where those thousands of satellites are locked in a fragile architecture that could be radically disrupted—with serious effects on our everyday lives—by a single orbital equivalent of a traffic accident. And while a number of companies in California and the West are working to ensure the safety of all that space-dwelling technology, the task poses serious challenges.
CONGESTION AHEAD
Imagine you’re on a highway, going 17,000 miles per hour,” says Melissa Quinn, a managing director at Slingshot Aerospace, an El Segundo startup focused on addressing space congestion for satellite companies. “There are thousands of other cars like you going that same speed. And imagine most of them don’t have insurance, they’re maybe new drivers, teenagers out on the road. Imagine then you suddenly put blindfolds on, and there’s no laws, there’s no police, there’s no traffic control.”
“That is the problem of space debris,” Quinn continues. “And we’re adding more and more cars to the situation every single year.” And we’re adding them quickly. Companies like SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper Systems are set to deploy or expand “constellations” whose individual satellites can number in the thousands. Starlink currently has the most, at more than 6,000 satellites, and could eventually push that number as high as 42,000. One government report projects that more than 50,000 new satellites will be launched by 2030. That’s a lot of road-happy teens.
Slingshot hopes to address the problem with an early-warning system that can alert satellite operators to oncoming traffic in time for them to move out of the way. The company’s network of more than 150 terrestrial (ground-based) sensors, located around the world, can track satellites and other objects in low Earth orbit (LEO), an altitude of 1,200 miles or less. This includes communications and surveillance satellites deployed by companies like SpaceX and Planet Labs as well as orbital surveillance platforms controlled by the world’s governments. (LEO is where most communications and surveillance satellites hang out, since signals can go back and forth between satellites and Earth more quickly than at higher altitudes.) Slingshot’s software systems automatically generate what’s essentially an orbital traffic report and can alert customers to “conjunctions”: situations in which one satellite could collide with another. Slingshot is one of several satellite-tracking companies that recently won contracts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is in the process of taking over nonmilitary satellite tracking from the Department of Defense.
LEO is currently “the most dense it’s ever been,” Quinn says, with more launches, more deployments, and more spacecraft in orbit than ever before. With that has come more need to mitigate risk: another record that was broken last year, Quinn says, was the number of satellites forced to maneuver out of the way of a piece of space debris.
“What we’ve been seeing in the past five years is the massive industrialization of low Earth orbit,” McDowell says. And the number of satellites up there isn’t the only problem. According to McDowell, it’s also the number of players in the satellite game. “In the day, it was the U.S. government and the Soviet government,” he tells me. “Now it’s every startup on every street corner and every developing country and a bunch of universities, so there are thousands of different operators. That actually is maybe the more challenging thing. When two satellites are going too close to each other, who do you call?”
“We’re now at the point where the satellite companies say they can navigate safely without hitting things,” McDowell continues, “but the number of dodge maneuvers that each satellite has to do has gone way up. I feel like we’re on the hairy edge.”
THE DROIDS
With great challenges come great opportunities, of course, which is why Slingshot isn’t the only company getting into space traffic control. Turion Space in Irvine, LeoLabs in Menlo Park, and Privateer, a startup on Maui that counts Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak among its founders, are all watching the skies to figure out how to make the space lanes safer.
Turion founder and CEO Ryan Westerdahl notes that satellite traffic is only one part of the challenge. “There are quite a few objects in the 1-to-2-centimeter-to-10-centimeter range, and all those objects are not tracked and cataloged. That’s a pretty serious problem,” he says. “If a coin-sized object crashes into your satellite when you’re going 13 kilometers a second, you’re not going to have a good day.”
After eight years as a SpaceX engineer, Westerdahl started Turion in 2020 and took it through the Y Combinator accelerator program with a plan to build satellites that can collect small pieces of orbital debris, move larger objects out of the way, and do space-based surveillance of objects in orbit. This last function will let Turion start to get a handle on the millions of objects smaller than a softball. The company has secured a number of small contracts with the U.S. Air Force and NASA and is positioning itself to help with national security.
“We’re building Droid satellites to secure our future in space,” Westerdahl tells me. (The name is a shout-out to Star Wars.) “The two most pressing issues in the space industry are orbital debris and ensuring U.S. superiority in the space domain. Our adversaries are doing threatening things in space.”
What kind of threatening things? Well, take the ground-based anti-satellite missile tested by Russia in 2021 that took out a Russian satellite—an explosion that created 1,500 pieces of trackable debris and probably left hundreds of thousands of smaller objects in orbit, according to the U.S. Space Command. The Biden administration recently warned that Russia is now pursuing a new, more advanced anti-satellite weapons system.
“Space is a very fragile environment,” Westerdahl says. “Just like it’s important to maintain superiority in the naval fleet and the air forces, space is also very important.”
Turion’s Droid satellites should be able to “observe adversaries from a distance, potentially without them knowing,” Westerdahl says, something that Turion could offer to both the government and the private sector. “We don’t have to operate in a fully classified environment but can still provide value to various defense and intelligence agencies.”
If Turion has big ambitions—Westerdahl hopes to eventually get into “platinum-group-metals asteroid mining”—it’s early days yet for the fledgling company. Its first satellite was launched last year and is still undergoing testing. Yet there are relatively few companies working on deorbiting or otherwise removing debris from orbit, and even companies with better funding and more history—including Japan’s Astroscale and Sweden’s ClearSpace—are at similar places in their development.
SPACE TECHNOLOGY
Picturing near-Earth space as a 17,000-mile-per-hour teenage rush hour produces a colorful and affecting image. But it tells only half the story.
“We rely on space for everything we do in our modern lives,” Slingshot’s Quinn says. “People don’t realize they’ve got space technology in their hands.”
It’s true: satellites are more present in the backgrounds of our lives than most people realize. They’re part of our telephone and television networks, banking systems, mobile data services, and GPS navigation and are used to monitor everything from the weather to crop growth, tanker routes, animal migration, trucking traffic, and land subsidence in California’s San Joaquin Valley (where overpumping of groundwater has caused some areas to lose as much as 28 feet of altitude). Then there are the world’s military powers, which use satellites to track troop movements, guide drones, and spy on suspicious individuals (or, according to some, just anyone) both at home and abroad.
“If we’re not conscious of how we’re approaching space and we’re not up to trying to solve that problem, it could just take one major collision and we could wipe out the financial network overnight,” Quinn says.
“The near misses are probably constant at this point,” says Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space, a research and investment banking firm that covers the sector. Henry cites a near miss earlier this year in which a NASA spacecraft came within 65 feet of an inactive Russian satellite. About a week later, the International Space Station was forced to maneuver out of the way of an Earth-observation satellite in order to avoid disaster.
“The fact that we have humans in space means it’s not just about the technology,” Quinn says. “As more and more humans go to space, there’s a risk to human life now as well.”
Some orbits are already unusable because of the volume of debris they contain, according to Henry. “The concern is that if nobody was to care for how the space environment is used, we could one day find ourselves in a position where we actually preclude ourselves from its use.”
The doomsday scenario that haunts physicists, satellite operators, investors, and other spaceniks is something called the Kessler syndrome, after NASA scientist Donald Kessler, who in 1978 predicted that if we kept flinging objects into orbit, the debris produced by the inevitable collisions would eventually become so vast that it would cause a cascade—a chain reaction in which debris from collisions would lead to more collisions, which would lead to more debris, which would lead to more collisions, and so on, without end. In most scenarios, this leads to orbital space becoming nearly impossible to navigate. In that case, Westerdahl says, “less people are going to go into space, advancement of space technology is going to stagnate, then we’re just sitting around waiting for some rock to take us out like it did the last group 66 million years ago. We really see it as a civilization-level risk.”
BURNED UP
It’s not too late,” says Harvard’s McDowell when I ask him what happens if we don’t act. “We are going to need to regulate low Earth orbit a lot more strongly. But I think the timescale of regulatory change is so much longer than the timescale of commercial development that it’s a big challenge. We will see more collisions, and people will wring their hands, but they may not do anything. It’s the usual environmental problem. At a certain point, when it starts affecting the companies’ bottom lines, then they will self-regulate at some level. But that tends to be a level at which things are pretty bad.”
If a piece of space debris punches a hole in your house or burns up in a dozen blazing fireballs streaking overhead, as several pieces of International Space Station junk did above Sacramento last year, you may feel things are bad enough already. So the next time you pull up directions on your phone, think about the thousands of teenage drivers speeding around Earth above you and—if you don’t want to go the way of the dinosaurs—pray that someone sends them all to an orbital driver’s ed.•
Mark Wallace is the founding executive director of the Writer’s Grotto and a contributing editor at Alta Journal.
