Space Junk Gold Rush: Inside the 2025–2032 Race to Clean Up Earth’s Orbit and Cash In on Sustainability
Over 32,000 debris objects are regularly tracked, with an estimated 130+ million fragments too small to track, and a 1-centimeter piece can disable a satellite. The International Space Station has performed nearly 40 evasive maneuvers to dodge debris. Kessler Syndrome describes a self-sustaining cascade of collisions that could render portions of orbit unusable. In 2007, China’s anti-satellite test created over 3,000 trackable fragments, and in 2009 a collision between a U.S. Iridium satellite and a dead Russian Kosmos satellite generated another large debris field. There are over 9,000 active satellites in orbit as of 2023, with forecasts of 20,000 to