In Sky Alert! What Happens When Satellites Fail (2013), Les Johnson had written about satellites being brought down by orbital debris, solar storms and war. In his 2021 novel Out of Sight, Martin Granger wrote about rogue orbital junk colliding with geosynchronous satellites—such as the GPS network that orbits at about 20,000 km—and sending them crashing down to Earth.
Both the nonfiction and fictional prognoses were brutal: in the collision chain reaction, GPS would be disabled, resource and environmental monitoring lost, flights would crash, spysats and military recon would die, and satellite telescopes blinded.
The domain of science fiction and somewhat outré intellectual maundering a quarter-century ago, no longer is a cascading satellite-collision event considered improbable.
In the third week of October, a piece of smoking space junk landed in the desert on an access road to a mine in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, and reignited slow-burn concerns that the Kessler Syndrome, which all space scientists fear, had become not an ‘if’, but a ‘when’.
It is a near-mantra in catastrophology that there is a wait period of roughly half-a-century before theory becomes fact. Nasa scientists Donald Kessler and Burton Cour-Palais proposed the Kessler Syndrome theory in 1978: that overcrowding in low Earth orbit—800-2,000 km in space, where most satellites are parked—could start a domino effect of collisions with cataclysmic impacts.
In a sense, it is time for the theory to show its teeth. And it has.
As of 2022, there were an estimated 15,100 metric tonnes of space debris shooting round Earth –54,000 pieces 10 cm in length and longer (about 9,300 of them with active payloads), 1.2 million 1-10 cm in size, and more than 140 million from 1 mm to 1 cm. The ones less than a centimetre were considered technically impossible to track – until the Pilbara piece crashlanded. It was 150 cm in diameter, and should have been visible, but wasn’t.
The space archaeologist Alice Gorman, author of the 2019 book Dr Space Junk vs the Universe said, "There was no indication it was going to re-enter right now so people weren’t expecting it—when I went to look for re-entry predictions I couldn’t find anything, which is an indication of the suddenness of it.”
According to the US Aerospace Corporation, a space object catalogue or satellite catalogue is maintained by Joint Combined Space Operations Center (CSpOC) at Vandenberg Air Force Base, part of the US Strategic Command.
One of CSpOC’s missions is to detect, track, and identify all objects in Earth orbit in addition to monitoring the International Space Station and other Nasa satellites for collisions.
Also located at Vandenberg Air Force Base is the US Air Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron, which operates the Space Surveillance Network, which oversees radar and optical sensors at various sites around the world.
These sensors observe and track objects that are larger than a softball in low Earth orbit (LEO) and basketball-sized objects or larger, in higher, geosynchronous orbits. The sensors can determine which orbit the objects are in, and that information is used to predict close approaches, reentries and the probability of a collision.”
In the event, CSpOC missed the Pilbara spacejunk altogether, raising questions about not only the efficacy of its panoptical claims but also about whether it is possible to track space debris individually in a sky full of them like confetti.
The Aerospace Corporation says that the “US military is currently tracking about 20,000 objects and has cataloged more than 40,000 objects over the years”. This means that the US military is currently tracking 0.014 percent of space debris, most but hardly all too tiny to be tracked. It’s like playing catch while blindfolded.
The European Space Agency’s Space Environment Report 2025 says that “intact satellites or rocket bodies are now re-entering the Earth atmosphere on average more than three times a day”.
Tipping Points of Space Debris in Low Earth Orbit, a paper published in the International Journal of the Commons in January 2024, says, “Over the past decade, the annual number of recorded re-entries has dramatically increased, averaging around 300 yearly re-entries from 2012 to 2019 and then growing to nearly 2000 yearly re-entries in 2021 to 2023.”
Gorman speculated that the Pilbara spacejunk could be the end-stage from a Chinese Jielong-3 rocket launched in late September.
A paper presented at the International Astronautical Congress in Sydney in early October states that 88 percent of “the 50 most concerning pieces of space junk in low Earth orbit” were rocket bodies.
But while the origin of the debris remains speculation—an investigation by the Australian Space Agency could take months—the Chinese National Space Agency reached out to Nasa “over a manoeuvre to prevent a possible collision between satellites”.
‘Nearspace’ has, according to the Space Debris User Portal, about 15,860 satellites, 12,900 of them functioning as of October 21.
At the current rate of rocket launches—258 in 2024 (the maximum in any year since the first launch in 1957), with the US leading with 145 launches – the end of this decade could see about 70,000 active satellites at altitudes below 2,000 km.
“If space debris is not stabilised in the relative near-term,” says the IJC paper, “any deferred efforts to clean LEO or reduce active missions will only grant a few additional decades.”
Imagine the sky afire with raining debris.
Kajal Basu | Veteran journalist
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)
(Views are personal)