That’s the warning from space policy experts and aerospace industry officials.
“If there are one or two more collisions in the most popular orbits, space debris could bring us very unhappy times,” said Michael Dyment, who advises corporations on the financial risks and benefits of aerospace investment as founder of NEXA Capital Partners.
Dyment discussed the issue of space debris at a recent Great Talk forum at Goucher College, sponsored in part by The Baltimore Sun.
For Maryland, where NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and major defense contractors anchor a $7 billion aerospace economy, the issue is more than theoretical. Experts say the federal government has long known that crowded orbits and unchecked debris pose growing risks to satellites, GPS and communications systems, but key efforts to track traffic and remove junk have stalled in Washington.
While the U.S. Space Force controls the nation’s space debris monitoring systems, the NASA Orbital Debris Program Office reported that more than 45,000 trackable, human-made objects are in Earth’s orbit as of early 2025. More than 25,000 pieces of debris are larger than 10 cm, with millions of smaller, untracked particles. The total mass of this orbital debris is roughly 9,000 metric tons.
Any crash between satellites in orbit creates countless pieces of untracked debris, moving at thousands of miles per hour, that can destroy or disable other satellites. A March explosion of a SpaceX Starlink satellite sent debris into orbit. Another Starlink self-deconstructed in December, though the company assures its satellites are designed to safely reenter the atmosphere and burn up. The 10,000-plus Starlinks remaining make up more than a third of tracked objects in low Earth orbit.
In 1978, NASA scientist David Kessler calculated the odds that such debris could cause a runaway chain reaction, making near-Earth space dangerous for all spacecraft and astronauts. The Kessler effect is named after him, and once it begins, it will continue until orbit is no longer usable.
“There are so many satellites, especially in the most popular orbits. The world just doesn’t have any mechanism for space traffic management or removal,” said David Koplow, a Georgetown Law professor on national security.
Before you can manage space junk, you have to know what and where it is, said Amber McIntyre, senior director of civil space at the Aerospace Industries Association. The world looks to America to lead, but no coordinated effort outside of the Department of Defense exists to track objects in orbit, McIntyre said.
“We all recognized that orbital debris presents a hazard,” McIntyre said at the Great Talk forum. “The way to avoid a collision is first to know who is moving where, and we don’t have that now.”
The Traffic Coordination System for Space, or TraCSS, to be managed by the Office of Space Commerce, stalled in 2025 due to budget negotiations, McIntyre said.
“The best thing the government can do is provide stability,” McIntyre said. “When you do not have predictable budgets, you have huge delays in innovation and miss out on opportunities.”
Another initiative to clean up debris in orbit, the ORBITS Act, was unanimously passed by the Senate twice but has not cleared the House of Representatives.
The inability to manage what’s in orbit means the risk will continue to grow, threatening crucial assets like Global Positioning Systems, Starlink, and even the humans on the International Space Station.
Other threats increase risks
Three days — that’s how long it might take for spacecraft to begin colliding if a massive solar storm of charged particles from the sun knocks out their navigation ability, according to the Outer Space Institute. This global network of space scientists created the Crash Clock to raise awareness of the issue.
“While this is a hypothetical situation, it reflects the degree to which humanity is dependent on errorless operations in orbit,” the institute’s website states.
An 1859 solar storm called the Carrington event showered Earth with so much radiation and charged particles that telegraph offices caught fire and auroras lit up the sky as far south as Florida.
“Today, such a storm could severely damage satellites, disable communications by telephone, radio, and TV, and cause electrical blackouts over whole continents,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which predicts space weather. “Solar storms like the one in 1859 happen only about every 500 years—thankfully. But smaller storms happen frequently, and storms half as intense as the 1859 storm happen about every 50 years.”
Another threat to satellites in orbit comes from other nations, said Peter Hays, senior policy advisor and professor of Space Policy and International Affairs at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute.
The Outer Space Treaty of 1977, signed by 115 nations, bans nuclear arms and weapons of mass destruction in space.
However, on April 24, 2024, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan wrote that Russia was developing nuclear weapons to deploy against satellites in space. That same day, Russia vetoed a UN resolution calling on member states to reaffirm the space treaty by not developing such armaments
“If a nuke goes off in low Earth orbit, it will destroy all of the satellites in low Earth orbit, because it charges up the Van Allen” radiation belts encircling the planet, Hays said at the Great Talk forum, “and satellites passing through those belts won’t be able to shed that charge.”
What’s at stake?
The global space economy is worth more than $600 billion a year, according to the World Economic Forum, and that number is expected to triple by 2035 to $1.8 trillion.
Far from just launching astronauts and space tourists, that economy touches everyone.
Global positioning systems, which keep your Waze directions on target, also contribute to $7 trillion in global business income, Dyment said, from manufacturing devices for phones and cars to commercial aviation.
“If we lose GPS, you also lose telecommunications, both land lines, cellular and fiber,” he said, because those systems depend on the timekeeping provided by satellites in orbit. “It has ramifications that we often don’t think about in our day-to-day lives.”
The threat could be closer to home.
On March 11, NASA’s Van Allen Probe A burned up in Earth’s atmosphere after 14 years in space. But in the days before it fell safely over the Pacific Ocean, officials did not know where it might come down. NASA had said it was possible for some components to survive reentry and gave 1 in 4,200 odds that they could harm someone on Earth.
Given the urgency to solve some of these problems cooperatively with other space-faring nations, Koplow said he sees positive and negative signs.
“There is such a thing as the law of outer space,” he said. “It’s an example of how, sometimes, when the international community confronts a new resource or danger, it comes together to create a legal framework quickly.”
He said the Outer Space Treaty took just 10 years to complete after Russia launched the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik, in 1967. By comparison, he said maritime law took nations centuries to get right, and aerospace law required decades of cooperation.
“The problem is, since the 1980s, the world stopped filling in the gaps,” he said. “The Outer Space Treaty was meant to be fleshed out by additional laws over time.”
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