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It's incredible how many satellites Space X have launched
It's also surprising from a layman's perspective the "freedom" to launch rockets into space without necessarily needing permission, the originating country of course needs to approve it but none else
That's... good? In more ways than one.
The most obvious is that any international body would be easily controlled by the big players, so you'd end up with more centralized control by the same national entities, but now they'd be controlling other countries launches as well.
The other problem is that lately international organizations have a pretty bad track record. Two examples, which I've chosen because they are actually both very important incidents and also squarely in the domain of the respective orgs: WHO with Covid with a mostly useless and visibly politicized reaction; and UN with Gaza, with a large block of Arab voters who are basically stuck at condemning Israel, but systematically refuse to actually step up and help with the problem. Both incidents are literally what those orgs were created to handle, and yet they don't.
Also space launches have a military component, not always public. I doubt many would agree to let an international body poke their nose in that.
It's really not all that surprising that space is treated like the oceans. There certainly are rules and norms of behavior, but you don't need to ask for permission to enter it.
> "freedom" to launch rockets into space without necessarily needing permission
Space is another public commons. I will assume it will follow the same trajectory as other public commons. A few decades of abuse, leading to consequences, leading to regulations. But the regulations won't happen until the consequences happens.
- The electromagnetic spectrum - https://www.britannica.com/topic/radio/The-Golden-Age-of-Ame...
- Low altitude airspace - Part 107 Rule
- Fisheries - UNCLOS
What would be needed is an international organization formed by at least all nations that have orbital launch capabilities to act as an FAA of sorts for rocket launches in general and putting things into orbit in particular. Earth orbit, and Low Earth Orbit especially so, is a limited resource and the outlook of permanently ruining dark skies globally or turning the skies into a big garbage patch that could make space travel impossible for centuries to come (aka Kessler syndrome) is just too bleak to not do it carefully with sustainability in mind.
The more crowded orbits aren't free. You can't just put a geostationary satellite anywhere you want.
Only the orbits that are more plentiful are free.
Yeah, it's kind of mind-blowing how much the space game has shifted from international diplomacy to private enterprise with a launch schedule
There are only like half a dozen countries capable of doing orbital launches. That number is smaller than those nuclear capable.
Permission granted by whom? Agencies and companies that launch satellites are subject only to the laws of the countries in which they are based. And it is not even imaginable to have a NPT-like system where a few "special" countries have the right to launch satellites while the others don't.
Who else would approve it?
The country is the atomic unit of global governance. Everything else is just hand-shake deals and "promises." If your country says you can do something, you can do it.
> "Earth has 4550 satellites in orbit"
Rapidly obsoleted information. SpaceX alone has > 7500 satellites in orbit. It added 2,300+ satellites in the one year period ending Jun 2025.
> It added 2,300+ satellites in the one year period ending Jun 2025.
Take in account, that a lot of those are replacement sats for the first generations that they are deorbiting already. Do not quote me on this, but its a insane amount (i though it was around 2k) of the first generation that they are deorbiting. If there is a issue, its not the amount of sats in space, but more the insane amount of deorbiting StarLink is doing.
Starlink wanted to put up insane numbers, but a lot of their fights contain a large percentage of replacement sats.
And they are getting bigger ... v1.5 is like 300kg, the v2.0 mini (ironic as its far from mini compared to its predecessors) are 800kg.
So before StarLink launched 60x v1.5's but now they are doing 21x v2.0 Mini's per launch.
The technology has been improving a lot, allowing for a lot more capacity per satellite. Not sure when they start launching v3's but those have like 3x the capacity for inner connects/ground stations and can go up to 1Gbit speeds (compared to the v2's who are again much more capable then multiple v1.5s).
So what we are seeing is less satellites per launch but more capacity per sat. This year is the last year that they are doing mass 1.5 launches, its all now going to the v2.0 "mini" (so 3x less sats).
The next line after the text you quote reads "(as of 9/1/2021)".
Not sure if number of satellites matters so much at this point. As India has already demonstrated that they can launch 100s of them on one rocket. Which means they can very cheaply put them into space as needed.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4226900/Indi...
This really isn't all that much if you pause to consider it. For example. Lets take the larger possible number of 7500 plus 2,300 plus the 4,550 satellites noted up to 2021. That's a total of just under 15,000 satellites. Most of those are fairly small objects, at the most about the size of a typical mini-van, with most being quite a bit smaller than that.
Now, all of this is spread over a three-dimensional topography that's much larger than the total surface area of the Earth, and because their orbits are, as mentioned, three-dimensionally occupying various altitudes, the size of the total topography they move through is enormously larger than just one single surface area in square kilometers of a single hypothetical sphere X km above the Earth's surface. In the least case, even if all existing orbital satellites were stationed at the lowest possible orbital altitude, that's still quite a bit bigger than the 509 600 000 square km of the Earth's total surface. (too lazy to calculate the specific increment in this moment)
Across all of that, just 15,000 objects that are individually smaller than your average family sedan.
For comparison, the island of Manhattan has approximately 116,000 buildings crammed into it. If you spread those more or less equi-distantly from each other across the whole of the Earth's surface, water or air, there'd still be a tremendous amount of empty space between them. That's nearly 10 times as many objects individually much larger than any human satellite, across a much smaller surface area than what's occupied by our orbital satellites.
(Yes, I know we also have a shit-load of other inert junk zipping around up there at tens of thousands of KM per hour, but even if that stuff, most of which is very tiny, were included, we're still talking about an enormous amount of empty space between objects)
Is there something like https://www.flightradar24.com for satellites?
Would be kind of interesting to build a “live” visualization of objects in earths orbit. But this would require accurate live data of those objects. Probably nothing that companies would publish.
On the other hand side: once the object and its orbit is identified, positions could be calculated…
Does anyone know more?
Another interesting site already featured on Hacker News.
https://stuffin.space also shows debree, and will show orbits when you click on objects.
Unlike aircraft, satellites have VERY predictable movements, with the occasional small maneuver.
> Did you know that we provide flexible and robust data acquisition hardware and software that can be used for testing satellites, rockets, airplanes, or helicopters in the air, in space, or on the ground? Our solutions are used and trusted by leading aerospace companies. Contact us to learn more.
Interesting article for a sales pitch. Nicely done.
Here's a related long-form article with more recent figures (and narratives),
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/07/23/world/asia/st... ("This Was Supposed to Be the Year China Started Catching Up With SpaceX")
If you want to avoid paywall - https://archive.ph/95S2U
For anyone interested in current data like this, Jonathan McDowell maintains GCAT which is a General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects (and does so fastidiously).
https://www.planet4589.org/space/gcat/index.html
Be warned if you planning to ingest this dataset, the dates are fun =)
It's interesting that the "E" in GEO, LEO, MEO, HEO is short for three different things: https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Ty...
It looks like (if I've parsed right) every one of them stands for "Earth", except that HEO alone can also be overloaded three ways (high-earth, highly-elliptical, and highly-eccentric).
This is unimportant, but: a site:nasa.gov search shows all three "HEO" acronyms in common use, there; and even Wikipedia abbreviates it inconsistently across entries[0-2].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_Earth_orbit ("A medium Earth orbit (MEO) is an Earth-centered orbit with an altitude above a low Earth orbit (LEO) and below a high Earth orbit (HEO)")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_elliptical_orbit ("A highly elliptical orbit (HEO) is")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Earth_orbit ("In this article, the non-standard abbreviation of HEO is used for high Earth orbit[2]")
[edit]: I overlooked the abbreviation of "geostationary equatorial orbit" for GEO, which brings it up to four different "E's"!
LEO is Low Earth Orbit
MEO is Medium Earth Orbit
The E is short for the same thing in this case.
GEO for Geostationary and HEO for High-Eccentricity are interesting, though.
It is the most common letter, but I agree that is funny.
The article may be from 2023, but the data is for 2021.
At the rate of Space X littering the sky with them, the 2021 statistics are somewhat irrelevant.
Unfortunately, not relevant anymore. Some information is from before 2021 on this page.
Pretty wild to think that over a third of all the satellites orbiting Earth belong to one private company. Space used to feel like the domain of governments and sci-fi
That was a few years ago. More like two thirds today.
Stats that are based only on the number of satellites can be very misleading as they don't differentiate between a 5 ton comm sat and an 1 kg cubesat.
Does that mean that the entire EU has no military satellites at all? (Or maybe like 10 from France's CNES, and that's it?)
I would have to suspect there are more US NRO ones that aren't listed. Misty and her descendants would like a word.
Dewesoft is only ranking the top 50 owners, so their stats may be wrong or misleading for the others.
Austria, for example, is listed as having only 1 satellite, but they have at least 4 according to the UCS Satellite Database.
So about 11000 units in the low orbit in 2025 and thats a mix of commercial and state satellites. I wonder how the traffic and distribution being governed
It would also be interesting to learn more about launch locations and how countries near the equator can benefit from this booming sector.
Poland have 10-20 satelites
2 army and many optical satelites , bocian, heveliusz, etc.
*that we know of
Off-topic but wow, what a nice, concise and no-bullshit cookie banner. I wish everyone's cookie banner was like this, the web would have been a better place! Seriously.