Everything still up there: the 35,036 tracked objects circling the Earth, and when they come down

How many would you guess?#

Before the answer: how many human-made objects do you think are circling the Earth right now, big enough to be tracked from the ground? Choose a number, then reveal it.

What all those dots are#

The US Space Force keeps the public catalogue of everything it tracks in orbit, down to about 10 cm in low orbit; CelesTrak publishes it. On 18 October 2026 it listed 35,036 objects still up.

Only 17,243 of them are satellites that still work. Another 2,903 are satellites that have died, 2,295 are the spent upper stages of the rockets that carried them, and 12,595 are fragments, a few of them unidentified: pieces from explosions, collisions and tests, lens caps, bolts, insulation.

ESA puts the number of objects tracked by the world's surveillance networks at about 47,140. Most debris is too small to track: ESA's model estimates 1.5 million pieces between 1 and 10 cm and 230 million between 1 mm and 1 cm, small enough to miss and fast enough to damage a satellite.

Above you right now#

Over London, above the horizon at this moment: … of the objects whose orbits are published. The nearest is …, … km away.

Search for your town, or click anywhere on the globe. This count is worked out on your own device from the published orbits of the 25,683 objects that have them, for your device's clock; nothing is sent anywhere.

It began with one#

On 4 October 1957 the Soviet Union put Sputnik 1 into orbit: a polished sphere of 84 kg with four antennas. The core stage of its rocket went up with it and was tracked too; it fell back on 1 December. By then Sputnik 2 had joined them, on 3 November. Sputnik 1 itself fell on 4 January 1958 (the catalogue says 3 January).

Scroll on, and each year fills the sky with everything that was up at the end of it.

The sky the year you were born#

Type the year you were born.

The oldest thing up there#

Vanguard 1, a 1.5 kg aluminium sphere the size of a grapefruit, was launched by the United States on 17 March 1958. It stopped transmitting in 1964 and has kept going round ever since: the oldest human-made object in orbit. Its rocket stage is up there too.

NASA's catalogue says it was first expected to stay up for 2,000 years, and that the pressure of sunlight and the thin air cut that to about 240.

One test, still up nineteen years later#

On 11 January 2007 a missile launched from China struck Fengyun-1C, an old Chinese weather satellite circling at about 850 km. The catalogue later listed 3,533 pieces. Today 2,313 of them are still up.

Within hours the pieces spread along the satellite's old path. Because each piece left at a slightly different speed, each orbit's plane drifts round the Earth at its own rate, and in a few years the single ring became a cage around the planet. The chart shows that spread, computed from each piece's first measured orbit.

Today: the pieces' published orbits

The first crash between two satellites#

On 10 February 2009, at 16:56 GMT, a working Iridium 33 communications satellite and the dead Russian Cosmos 2251 met over the far north of Siberia at about 790 km, at more than 11 km/s.

It was the first accidental collision between two intact satellites. Of the 1,714 catalogued Cosmos pieces, 608 are still up; of the 656 Iridium pieces, 115. The two clouds are lit on the globe.

Two working satellites in three are Starlinks#

SpaceX launched its first full batch of Starlink internet satellites in May 2019. Today 11,151 of them work: 65% of all working satellites in the catalogue.

Half of all the satellites now in orbit were launched after March 2024. Each square below is ten working satellites.

How high they fly#

About 84% of everything up there flies, on average, less than 2,000 km above the ground. The crowding is in layers: Starlink between 360 and 570 km, the old debris clouds around 800 km, the navigation satellites near 20,000 km, and the geostationary ring.

Choose a height on the chart to light only what flies there.

The ring that hangs still#

At 35,786 km a satellite takes one turn of the Earth, 23 hours 56 minutes, to go round, so it seems to stand still in the sky. 1,041 catalogued objects have an average height within 200 km of it, among them many television and weather satellites.

From London the ring crosses the sky 31° above the south horizon at its highest. A dish pointed there finds a satellite that never moves.

How long things stay up#

At these heights there is still a trace of air, and it slows everything down. The lower an object flies, the sooner it falls and burns up.

Choose a height to put something in orbit. The curve is what happened to the fragments and spent rocket stages left at that height since 1958 whose first orbit was measured soon after they were left: 14,924 objects at all heights, of which 10,944 have already come down.

A rule that works, and where it fails#

A rule of thumb from height alone should predict how fast a debris cloud thins out. To test it, 11 large clouds whose pieces were measured soon after the break-up were each predicted from every other fragment's history, and compared with what the catalogue says happened.

For 7 of the 11 the prediction is within 10 percentage points of today's count. Four miss, and the biggest misses are the most famous clouds. The Fengyun pieces have lasted longer than the rule says (69% of the 1,301 measured early are still up, against 48% predicted). The two clouds of the 2009 crash went opposite ways: the Cosmos pieces lasted longer (41% against 28%), the Iridium pieces fell much faster (16% against 46%). Height decides most of an object's fate; how much it weighs for its size probably decides much of the rest, and the light, flat pieces of a modern satellite would fall first.

What comes down#

In the twelve months to 18 October 2026, about 1,420 catalogued objects re-entered the atmosphere: nearly four a day. About 520 were Starlink satellites, 1.4 a day.

Almost everything burns up high above the ground. Large objects can leave pieces that reach the surface, which is why the big ones are tracked to the end.

Whose they are#

Every object is booked to the country or organisation that launched or owns it. The United States owns more than half of what is up there, most of it Starlink. More than half of the Russian objects, and more than two-thirds of the Chinese ones, are fragments.

The only British satellite on a British rocket is still up#

On 28 October 1971 a Black Arrow rocket launched from Woomera, in South Australia, put Prospero into orbit: the first and only British satellite sent up by a British rocket. The programme had already been cancelled.

Prospero still circles between 525 and 1,250 km. The Science Museum, which holds its twin, says it will not come down until the 2070s, a century after its launch.

Find anything#

Search by name: the International Space Station, Hubble, Vanguard 1, Prospero, Envisat. Or tap any dot on the globe.