Anyone with hardware or human crew in orbit knows the drill. Orbital collision warnings can be unremitting. Whether the object is a defunct satellite or a stray hunk of glass from a solar panel that shattered long ago, every item circling Earth is also a potential projectile. And nearly all of this junk, traveling at least eight times as fast as a rifle bullet, can be damaging in a collision. SpaceX’s Starlink satellites maneuvered around possible debris impacts 144,404 times over the first half of 2025. That’s a collision warning every couple of minutes, night and day, for six months straight—three times the rate of the previous six months. Looming on the horizon, too, is the threat of orbital junk overwhelming satellites’ ability to dodge disaster. Each collision then creates more fragments, in a runaway cascade that turns low Earth orbit into a hazard zone.
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