A few minutes after the sun retreated behind the Olympic Mountains, we spotted our first satellite. It moved across the sky with an eerie persistence, like a car on cruise control.  

“That’s low Earth orbit. That’s pretty standard speed,” Meredith Rawls, an astronomer at the University of Washington and my stargazing guide for the night, tells me.

The primal human experience of gazing into a dark, unblemished night sky — something we’ve been doing for at least 32,000 years, since our ancestors carved Orion onto a mammoth tusk — is vanishing. That nocturnal vista is becoming a dense, industrial field of orbiting debris. 

“I tell people, go to a dark site and see the sky now, while it’s like this,” Rawls says, gesturing to the constellations above us. She lets out a laugh. “It’s like, oh my God, what are we doing?”

The scale is hard to overstate. At the turn of the century, there were just over 700 active satellites in space. Now, with plans for hundreds of thousands more satellites — going from 15,000 today to half a million by 2040 — the new space race is not just a visual nuisance, it’s a toxic threat to our existence. 

When you look up at the night sky and wonder why the stars are moving, it’s not because you’re seeing a UFO. You’re likely looking at a satellite, and two out of every three belong to Elon Musk’s Starlink. 

Starlink is capable of beaming an internet connection to a dish the size of a pizza box, virtually anywhere in the world. The company’s on track for the largest initial public offering in history, largely on the back of all those satellites cruising through the skies. 

When Starlink launched its first satellite in 2019, it kicked off a gold rush in space. Amazon plans to send up 60,000 of its own satellites, Chinese companies nearly 60,000 more. Everyone across the globe, it seems, wants a piece of the sky. Rwanda alone applied for 337,320 satellites. In January, Starlink filed for a million orbital AI data centers. 

Spacefaring countries are technically bound by the United Nations’ Outer Space Treaty of 1967, but commercial enterprises are another story. And with space increasingly seen as a new theater of war, many nation-states are racing to launch their own mega-constellations.

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The ripple effects are as far-reaching as they are uncertain. 

Satellites are expected to disrupt the migratory patterns of birds, dung beetles and seals, which use the stars to navigate. 

Space junk from rocket launches and old satellites falls to Earth every day, increasingly through busy airspace. Last year, a piece of titanium and carbon fiber the size of a car tire landed near a school in Argentina.

Many tons of aluminum and lithium aerosols are added to the atmosphere when satellites reach the end of their lives and burn up, eating away at the ozone layer and potentially accelerating climate change.  

And, ironically, they’re also threatening to halt space exploration in its tracks, as thousands of satellites zooming at 17,000 miles per hour push us toward a chain reaction known as the Kessler syndrome, an apocalyptic feedback loop in which one collision could create thousands of pieces of debris that would then lead to more collisions.

“You cannot remove all these billions of small fragments from orbit. This will basically limit our access to space forever,” says Hanno Rein, an astrophysicist at the University of Toronto. “This is not going to go away. These small fragments will not necessarily deorbit quickly. They will stay there and make space inaccessible for future generations.”

As I part ways with Rawls, she seems cautiously pleased with how few satellites we saw. 

“A real takeaway from our observing session is that there are not yet an overwhelming number of bright satellites,” she says. “I hope you enjoyed your relatively pristine night sky experience.”

I get the feeling that I’m being told to enjoy it while it lasts.

15,000 satellites: How we got here

The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first satellite in 1957. It would take another 53 years before we passed 1,000 active satellites. Just 16 years after that, we passed 15,000.

Almost all of that growth is due to one company. When SpaceX launched its first batch of Starlink satellites in May 2019, there were only around 2,000 active satellites. It currently has more than 10,000 in orbit; the next closest operator is OneWeb, with 650. An average of 11 satellites have been launched every day in 2026, and with each one, the risk of collisions that generate dangerous space debris increases.

The causes for the prodigious satellite rise are complicated, but if I had to point to a single moment, I’d choose Dec. 22, 2015, the day that SpaceX landed its reusable Falcon 9 rocket for the first time.

Before the Falcon 9, space was mostly the domain of governments, which launched bus-sized satellites for GPS and weather forecasting. Satellite internet had been around since 2003, but those earlier versions lived in geostationary orbit, around 22,000 miles above the Earth’s surface. That high altitude allowed a single satellite to cover a broader area on the ground, but slow speeds and high latency made it a last resort for most people. 

Launching satellites into space is expensive. At the time the Falcon 9 first landed, Musk said it cost around $600 million to build, and another $200,000 in fuel costs to launch. Unlike all previous rocket boosters, the Falcon 9’s can be reused more than 10 times, and it doesn’t require much maintenance in between flights. That brought the launch costs down to $2,500 per kilogram, compared to $12,600 for SpaceX’s first rocket. Seemingly overnight, the economics of satellite launches became a lot more lucrative. 

But there was a reason satellite operators had been sticking to the geostationary orbit.

“The closer you come to the Earth, the more satellites you need,” says Barry Evans, a professor of satellite communications at the University of Surrey. 

Because SpaceX could reuse the Falcon 9, it was able to make use of low Earth orbit at roughly 342 miles above the ground. 

Data has to travel about 60 times farther to reach GEO satellites. Starlink’s lower elevation allows it to deliver a faster connection with lower latency, but it also requires hundreds or thousands of satellites to achieve global coverage. GEO satellites can do it with just a few, though Starlink still doesn’t meet the Federal Communications Commission’s standard for minimum broadband speeds.

Starlink didn’t actually become anyone’s internet provider until 2021. By then, dozens of other companies and countries had joined the race to LEO. Amazon Leo (formerly Project Kuiper) got FCC approval for 3,236 satellites in 2020, China’s Guowang started in 2022 with a planned 13,000 satellites and OneWeb launched the first of its now complete 650-satellite constellation in 2023. So far, Amazon Leo has sent up 241 satellites and expects to start offering service in mid-2026; Guowang has 168 operational satellites in orbit. 

“There’s a humongous amount of money going into these satellites,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist who tracks satellite launches. 

One analysis published in Science found that, between 2017 and 2022, countries collectively filed for over 1 million satellites across more than 300 separate systems.

A million data centers in space?

And those numbers don’t account for the data center boom coming to space. On Jan. 30, SpaceX filed an application with the FCC to launch “a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers.” Last week, Amazon’s Blue Origin filed for its own 50,000 orbital data center constellation. 

Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft plan to spend $630 billion on Earth-bound data centers and AI chips in 2026 alone. But most people don’t want them — or their enormous water and electricity appetites — in their towns. One study found that electricity rates could rise 8% on average in the US through 2030 due to increased demand from data centers, along with cryptocurrency generation.

Moving them to space would solve the “not in my backyard” problem, and it would theoretically negate their massive water and energy consumption on Earth. As Musk put it recently, “Space has the advantage that it’s always sunny.” 

SpaceX hasn’t received the green light yet for its million data centers, but FCC Chair Brendan Carr publicly voiced his approval. There’s currently no timeline for the plan, and SpaceX did not respond to my request for comment, but Musk said on a podcast in January that “in 36 months, probably closer to 30 months, the most economically compelling place to put AI will be space.” 

I was met with a lot of raised eyebrows when I asked satellite experts about SpaceX’s plan for 1 million data centers. 

“I don’t really think they’re going to do a million anyway. I think it’s going to be more at the 100,000 level. But I’m still very worried about 100,000 and whether that’s sustainable,” says McDowell. “Yes, technically, we can put them up there. But do we really want to?”

These data center satellites will be much larger than the Starlink satellites that beam internet connections back and forth from Earth. Recent comments from Musk indicate they’ll be around 560 feet long — more than five times the size of the most common Starlink satellites in the sky currently. 

“We have a couple trends happening at the same time that are concerning. Satellites are starting to get big again, and we’re getting more of them,” says Darren McKnight, senior technical fellow at LeoLabs, a company that tracks objects in orbit.

Tim Farrar, a satellite industry consultant, described the million data centers proposal as the latest in a long line of use cases SpaceX has floated for its Starship rocket, which is still in its prototype phase, from delivering military cargo to international travel via rocket. The Starship is roughly four times bigger than the Falcon 9 and capable of carrying as much as 150 tons to low Earth orbit, but in testing it has exploded on launch roughly half the time.  

“To justify making thousands of Starships when they’re reusable, you need to launch them very, very frequently,” says Farrar. “He’s now found this very fortunate confluence of AI demand and issues associated with permitting on the ground.”

‘The new theater of defense’

In mid-2025, Musk called Starlink “the backbone of the Ukrainian army.”

“Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off,” Musk said in a post on his social media platform X.

Musk was urging an end to the war with Russia, and he wasn’t wrong that Starlink had been instrumental in Ukraine’s military operations. By that point, the Ukrainian army had been using Starlink for more than three years to fly drones, course-correct artillery fire and help troops communicate. 

It was an early indicator that Starlink had grown beyond its mission of providing internet connections to rural areas. It was now one of the most coveted tools in a modern military’s arsenal.

Starlink’s involvement in wars on Earth is just the beginning. It’s going to become a military target in space, as will satellites used for GPS, reconnaissance and missile warnings. 

As far back as 2019, President Donald Trump declared space the “the next war-fighting domain” when he formally established the United States Space Command as part of the military, and it’s explicitly codified in the Space Force’s founding doctrine. 

“Space has become a new theater of defense,” says Joanna Darlington, chief communications officer at Eutelsat, the company that owns OneWeb. “You start getting terrestrial infrastructure destroyed, or submarine cables cut, or satellites jammed by your enemies. The only quick fix for that is satellite today.”

Musk’s involvement was unusually hands-on for an executive at a private company. In mid-2022, the SpaceX CEO denied Ukraine’s request to activate Starlink in Russian-occupied Crimea, citing concerns about escalation. Russia has also reportedly used smuggled Starlink terminals to extend the range of its drone strikes. Musk said in a Jan. 31 post that SpaceX had stopped the use of unauthorized Starlink by Russia. 

Soon after, Russia reportedly began working on a missile system capable of hitting Starlink satellites in orbit and creating orbital clouds of debris that would disable multiple satellites at once. 

“They become legitimate targets because of the geopolitical influence they have,” says Hugh Lewis, a professor of astronautics at the University of Birmingham. “It’s no longer just about providing someone in their apartment fast internet.”

It already tested one such weapon in 2021, when it intentionally destroyed one of its own defunct satellites. That event alone created more than 1,500 pieces of debris larger than a softball and likely hundreds of thousands of smaller pieces, forcing astronauts in the nearby International Space Station to shelter in capsules. 

And Chinese anti-satellite technology has advanced so far that it can now threaten any US satellite in low Earth orbit, and likely also those in medium Earth orbit and geostationary orbit, one report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies determined.

What scientists are concerned about

The causes fueling the satellite space race are many and diverse, and so are the effects. Scientists have voiced concerns about a number of unintended consequences that could spring from sending so much metal into orbit. 

“We have concerns about the atmosphere, we have concerns about space traffic management. We have concerns about astronomy and concerns about radio interference,” McDowell says. “All of these things become significantly worse at 100,000 and really, seriously problematic.”

Some of them we’re already seeing, and some can only be calculated in a lab and projected into the future. 

Earth’s atmosphere as a space dump

Space debris is nothing new, and Russia isn’t the only country that’s been turning low Earth orbit into a garbage dump. 

The US destroyed a failing reconnaissance satellite of its own in 2008, and India followed suit in 2019, but those tests produced far fewer — and long-lasting — pieces of debris than Russia’s 2021 test that put ISS astronauts in jeopardy.

But when I talk to astronomers who spend a lot of time thinking about space debris, it’s clear that one event haunts them more than the others. 

In 2007, China blew up a weather satellite, creating the largest debris cloud in history. Overnight, 3,533 pieces of softball-or-larger pieces of metal were added to low Earth orbit, and an estimated 150,000 smaller objects. Before the test, there were fewer than 8,000 tracked objects in LEO altogether. 

“That one single test increased orbital debris by one third. And that’s still up there,” says Sven Bilen, an engineering professor at Penn State University.

The Secure World Foundation estimates that 2,351 pieces of debris from that single day in 2007 are still in orbit. The Chinese satellite was in orbit 537 miles (865 kilometers) above Earth when it was blown up, compared to the roughly 310 miles (500 kilometers) at which most Starlink satellites operate. That higher altitude means the debris would take longer to be pulled into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it would burn up. 

“It’s an exponentially varying atmosphere. By the time you get to 750 kilometers, it’s up there for decades to centuries,” says McKnight. “At 450, 500 kilometers, you’re talking weeks to months.”

It’s worth acknowledging here that space is huge, and 25,000 softball-sized objects zooming hundreds or thousands of miles above our heads doesn’t seem like such a big deal. The problem comes when those objects start occupying the same space as the 15,000 active satellites in orbit. 

With space debris moving about 10 times faster than a bullet, even a softball-sized object hitting a satellite would be devastating. That impact would create many more softballs, which could take out even more satellites. This apocalyptic feedback loop is called the Kessler Syndrome, and the scientists I spoke to agree that it’s just a matter of when, not if, it happens. 

“We don’t know where we are on that curve, but at some point, every piece of hardware that you put up there is going to be more likely than not to generate additional debris,” Bilen says. “It becomes a runaway phenomenon.”

“If we keep doing what we are doing right now, which is almost nothing, it’s very likely,” Bilen adds. “I don’t know when, but it’s very likely.”

Almost every astrophysicist I spoke with mentioned the 2013 movie Gravity, which famously dramatized a Kessler syndrome-like scenario, depicting astronauts forced to abandon their space shuttle as a debris cloud swarms them. They emphasized that it won’t manifest as a single catastrophic moment like that, but will instead take place over years, as space slowly becomes deadly for astronauts and satellites alike.  

“We’re boiling the frog. It’s increasing slowly, and all of a sudden we’ll get to a point and go, ‘Wow, that’s really bad,’” says McKnight. “There are indicators that we’re getting closer, indicators that the timeline is shrinking.”

Satellites maneuver to avoid collisions

Despite some close calls, satellites have so far been exceptionally nimble at avoiding space debris. 

When Starlink first launched in 2019, it made a “collision avoidance” maneuver if the probability of impact was greater than 1 in 100,000 — the same number that NASA uses for human spaceflight. Starlink has since moved that number to a more conservative 3 in 10 million.

But even with that more conservative threshold, its satellites still made about 300,000 maneuvers last year alone — an increase from around 200,000 in 2024. Depending on who you ask, that number is evidence of Starlink’s spotless safety record or an unsustainably high number of moving satellites. 

If Starlink achieved its goal of 1 million orbital data centers, that would add up to 272 million maneuvers a year, or nine every second, according to Hugh Lewis, the astronautics professor. 

“The very fact that you have to maneuver degrades your ability to detect whether you need to maneuver,” says Lewis. “Anybody else who wants to operate in that environment is going to be looking at this fuzzy ball of stuff that’s always moving.”

There’s also a risk of solar storms disrupting satellites’ ability to maneuver. These blasts from the sun occur when twisted magnetic fields reach their breaking point, sending bursts of energy throughout the entire solar system. 

Solar storms could slow down your internet temporarily or they could take out satellites altogether, according to researchers at the University of California, Irvine. In February 2022, 38 Starlink satellites were destroyed by one such event. 

“We can predict these events sometimes, but certainly not always,” says Sascha Meinrath, professor of telecommunications at Penn State University. “They can rapidly — and by rapidly, I mean, within minutes to hours — dramatically increase the scale of atmospheric drag.”

In response, Starlink’s satellites autonomously adjust their altitude. Neighboring satellites make their own adjustments, and it can take three to four days before they’re stabilized at their original altitudes. 

A paper published in December described this as an “orbital house of cards.” The authors estimated that it would take 5.5 days for a “catastrophic collision” to occur if maneuvers stopped or severe situational awareness loss occurred due to an event like a solar storm. In 2018, the year before Starlink launched its first satellites, that number was 164 days. In the four months since the paper was first submitted, the clock has dropped to just three days. (The paper has not been peer-reviewed.)

Three days is already an alarmingly short period of time to avoid “catastrophic outcomes.” What happens if we go from 15,000 satellites to millions?

Space junk doesn’t always stay in space

The Earth’s stratosphere acts as a great filtering system for those of us on the ground. But just as some meteors survive the trip, space debris doesn’t always stay in space. As more rockets are launched and more satellites are deorbited, the likelihood of a piece of them reaching Earth increases. 

A January 2025 paper published in Scientific Reports determined that there’s a 26% chance each year that a piece of spacecraft will pass through some of the world’s busiest airspace. When they factored in planned megaconstellations from companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, the probability of a fatal aircraft collision with reentry debris increased to 7 in 10,000 per year by 2035. 

“You hit what’s known as the law of truly large numbers,” says Lewis. “Even if it’s a really, really low likelihood, enough opportunities means it’s going to happen.” 

And it has already happened, with alarming frequency. According to NASA, an average of one cataloged piece of debris fell back to Earth every day during the last 50 years. Most of this lands harmlessly in oceans or remote areas — NASA says that “no serious injury or significant property damage” has been confirmed — but a January study published in Science noted that the risks are growing with an increasingly crowded orbit.

A 2022 study published in Nature Astronomy put the danger in starker terms, noting that there’s a 10% chance that someone is killed by space debris over a decade. It also cautioned that this is a conservative estimate given the acceleration of rocket launches.

Last year alone, space junk fell on a mine in Australia, on a farm in Argentina, in the Algerian desert, near a school in Argentina and at a warehouse in Poland. In 2024, fragments from a SpaceX rocket landed 40 miles apart in North Carolina. One 15-inch piece landed on a man’s roof while he was home watching TV.  

“It’s fairly difficult to always have a controlled re-entry. As I like to say, we want to have a splash, not a thud,” says McKnight. 

In other words, operators should aim to deorbit satellites “over the open ocean, away from populated islands and heavily trafficked airline and maritime routes.” Debris from rocket launches is necessarily closer to civilization. NASA guidelines for debris re-entry say the risk of a human casualty should be less than 1 in 10,000.

“As you get more and more satellites up there, more and more rockets, more and bigger payloads, if this trend is going to hold true, that’s going to be more and more difficult to adhere to,” says McKnight. “If you have enough events, somebody’s going to get hurt.”

Taking out the orbital trash

One way to clean up space debris is to steer satellites toward the atmosphere, where they burn up. With constant propellant needed to overcome atmospheric drag, most satellites in low Earth orbit only last around five to eight years. SpaceX deorbits its Starlink satellites after roughly five years in the sky.

“Deorbiting” is a benign word for a violent process. When a Starlink satellite hits the end of its life, SpaceX operators activate a “drag sail,” which is essentially a kite that slowly pulls the satellite closer to Earth. When it reaches the dense upper atmosphere after a few months, the satellite is incinerated. It’s a spectacular sight from the ground — a fireworks grand finale on a cosmic scale.

Starlink’s satellites weigh roughly as much as a Honda Civic, and an average of almost two were deorbited every day last year. 

And scientists fear those burnups could be doing irreparable damage to our atmosphere. As old satellites are ignited on reentry, the plastics and carbon-fiber composites in them release particles of black carbon — the same sooty material produced by a campfire — as well as metals like aluminum and lithium.

“You’re putting a gray blanket in the stratosphere, which is absorbing and heating up aluminum,” says Rajan Chakrabarty, a chemical engineering professor at Washington University in St. Louis who researches the effects of aerosols on the atmosphere. “This extra heat is just going to cause imbalance.”

We’ve only recently started seeing them reach the end of their lives in significant numbers, but scientists are already observing the effects.

One study funded by NASA and published in Geophysical Research Letters in mid-2024 found that a 550-pound satellite releases about 66 pounds of aluminum oxide nanoparticles when it’s deorbited. These nanoparticles grew eightfold from 2016 to 2022, before the satellite space race kicked off in earnest. The most common Starlink satellites weigh 2,750 pounds each; the next generation will weigh 4,409 pounds. 

“We projected a yearly excess of more than 640% over the natural level. Based on that projection, we are very worried,” Joseph Wang, one of the authors of the Geophysical Research Letters study, told me in an interview last year, referring to the presence of aluminum particles. 

Samples taken in 2023 by scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — before satellites started getting deorbited en masse — found aluminum and exotic metals embedded in about 10% of the stratosphere. They estimated that this could grow to 50% “based on the number of satellites being launched into low Earth orbit.”

The ripple effects of all this are still unclear. Huge amounts of black carbon could absorb incoming sunlight or scatter it; it could even change how heat moves around the climate system. The many tons of metallic aerosols added to the atmosphere could actually help cool the planet. (Some geoengineering scientists have even proposed this as a solution to climate change.) Another study determined that the warming effect of black carbon could raise stratospheric temperatures by as much as 1.5 degrees Celsius. 

Perhaps the most worrying unknown is how this will affect the Earth’s ozone layer, a section of the stratosphere that absorbs radiation from the sun. According to the EPA, ozone depletion leads to health issues like skin cancer, cataracts and weakened immune systems, as well as reduced crop yield and disruptions in the marine food chain.  

“We are shooting in the dark. We really don’t know what’s going to happen,” says Chakrabarty. “These things change slowly, and most of the changes are irreversible. It might not be tangible to our eyes, but by the time we feel the effects of a changing climate, it’s going to be too late.”

Wild West: Who is governing the satellite ecosystem?

For as long as humans have been launching objects into orbit, there’s been an effort to set up international guardrails. A year after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the United Nations established the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. 

The committee’s early meetings were filled with a sense of guarded optimism about the possibilities for international cooperation that satellite communication could open up. Their grasp of the challenges ahead was equally prescient. At its third meeting in 1962, USSR ambassador Platon D. Morozov accurately charted the dilemma we’re facing today. 

“As more and more satellites and other scientific instruments are being launched every year, and since the number of countries conducting such experiments is bound to increase, it becomes important to establish juridical provisions,” Morozov said. In other words, space activities need rules.

Four years later, the Outer Space Treaty was signed by the US, the USSR and the UK, with a core principle stating that “states shall avoid harmful contamination of space.”

That spirit of international cooperation has since waned. In theory, the Outer Space Treaty sets the rules, and individual governments are responsible for enforcing them. But that obligation has often taken a backseat in the US.

“In practice, it’s not quite a rubber stamp, but I wouldn’t describe the FCC’s reviews as especially adversarial,” McDowell says. “Although they do talk about preserving the environment, it doesn’t seem to me to be as high a priority as making money.”

Satellite operations are coordinated globally through the UN’s International Telecommunication Union, which regulates things like spectrum allocation, frequency assignments and orbital positions. What it doesn’t do is coordinate space traffic or instill environmental guidelines.  

“There’s no common understanding in terms of what’s right of way in space,” says Victoria Samson, chief director of space security and stability for the Secure World Foundation. “If they can both maneuver, who moves?”

When Starlink was essentially alone in low Earth orbit, this wasn’t much of an issue. They were largely self-policing, but they were widely considered to be responsible operators. But as more and more countries plan their own mega-constellations, frictions have risen to the surface.

In June last year, the European Union proposed a new Space Act, which would require satellite operators to address issues like space debris and collision avoidance. It’s not expected to be adopted until late 2028.

The US State Department responded by saying it has “deep concern” about the “unacceptable regulatory burdens” the legislation would impose on satellite operators. FCC Chair Brendan Carr went as far as to say the US would retaliate if the act is passed. Representatives from the FCC didn’t respond to my requests for comment.

“We just want to make sure that every satellite operator gets a fair shake in Europe,” Carr said at a telecom conference in March. “If Europe wants to go in a different direction, there are European satellite operators that do business in America, and we’ll mirror the regulatory approach that Europe wants to take.”

The tit-for-tat highlights the challenges of regulating an industry whose infrastructure lives a thousand miles above our heads. Nations can decide which companies are allowed to sell satellite services within their borders; it’s another thing to mandate that they behave a certain way in space. 

“There are few industries where there’s a global regulatory body,” says Joanna Darlington, the Eutelsat communications officer. “This is the challenge of space, because it doesn’t belong to anyone.”

Why satellites are here to stay

Like it or not, satellites are here to stay, and we’re increasingly reliant on them for disaster relief, emergency response, environmental monitoring, agriculture production and everyday navigation. There’s also Starlink’s 10 million customers around the world, many of whom had never had a modern internet connection before SpaceX launched all those satellites into orbit.

But as wildly successful as the low Earth orbit satellite era has been, it could be creating the conditions for its own demise as space debris keeps accumulating. 

“Orbital debris mitigation and cleanup is a massive, massive challenge,” says Bilen. “We can’t even clean up the great garbage patch of the Pacific Ocean, which is right here on the surface of the Earth. Now imagine trying to do that in space.”

Meredith Rawls, the University of Washington astronomer, reminded me that there is one precedent for the global community coming together to tackle a seemingly insurmountable problem: the 1987 Montreal Protocol. The landmark agreement phased out chlorofluorocarbons from household products that had opened a hole in the ozone layer, leading toward a full recovery expected by 2066. Nearly 40 years later, it’s still the only UN treaty ratified by every country on Earth.  

Ironically, that recovery is now in danger of being reversed by the satellite space race.

“I actually like the ozone layer as a success story of international cooperation,” Rawls says. “We fixed a thing! Countries worked together to notice something was broken. 

“I wonder if we could do that again.”

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