For most of the space age, our presence in Earth’s orbit has been relatively modest. Until the beginning of the 21st century, only a few hundred satellites orbited the Earth at any one time, and the number grew to a few thousand in the 2010s. But in 2019, everything changed. That was the year one company – SpaceX – launched the first satellites for its Starlink Internet constellation. SpaceX has been relentlessly throwing Starlink satellites into orbit ever since and just reached a major milestone that marks this terrifying new era.
As of today, more than 10,000 active Starlink satellites are in space, accounting for approximately two-thirds of all satellites currently in orbit. It’s a number that would have seemed incredible just a decade ago – and a rate of growth that experts still struggle to understand. “Starlink has changed our relationship with space,” says Hugh Lewis, a space junk expert at the University of Birmingham in England. “The character of the night sky is no longer the same as it once was, and I’m not sure it ever will be again.”
At 1:19 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, March 17, a Falcon 9 rocket launched from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California with 25 Starlink satellites on board. That brings SpaceX’s total number of Starlink satellites in orbit to 10,020, according to statistics compiled by Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist who tracks global space launches. The company has only now reached the five-figure operational figure: it has launched a total of 11,529 Starlink satellites since May 2019, but some of these have been replacements for decommissioned spacecraft that have been deorbited.
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The scale of Starlink is hard to overstate. What began as a speculative project to send the Internet to Earth from space has become much more. Around the world, Starlink is used by 10 million users and counting, from rural communities to Ukrainian battlefields to remote Amazonian tribes. That gives SpaceX, and its CEO Elon Musk, unprecedented geopolitical power: the ability to turn the Internet on and off for entire regions on a whim.
And that power hasn’t gone unnoticed by competitors trying to compete with Starlink’s dominance. In the US, the Jeff Bezos-backed Amazon Leo constellation has launched about 200 of more than 7,500 planned satellites. In China, the government-backed Qianfan and Guowang constellations aim for 15,000 and 13,000 satellites, respectively. “If there are more players in the market apart from SpaceX, this monopoly they have on satellite internet will definitely deteriorate,” said Mustafa Bilal, a researcher at the Center for Aerospace & Security Studies (CASS) in Islamabad, Pakistan.
For now, however, Starlink reigns supreme, representing the status as a marvel of SpaceX’s world-leading logistics, manufacturing and launch capabilities. The company’s reusable Falcon 9 rocket, now with more than 600 launches to its name, has given SpaceX the ability to deploy Starlink at extraordinary speed, with up to 60 satellites into orbit per launch. In contrast, the second largest constellation in space, Europe’s OneWeb, counts a small 654 satellites.
Starlink dominates the altitudes where it operates: around 480 to 550 kilometers (300 to 340 miles) above Earth. Around the clock, the satellites autonomously avoid each other – and other satellites too – to avoid collisions that could produce thousands of pieces of space debris. If such satellites collided, this could trigger a cascade of collisions that could render areas of Earth’s orbit temporarily unusable in a scenario called the Kessler syndrome.
In December 2025, SpaceX submitted a report to the Federal Communications Commission which, combined with an earlier report it submitted last June, showed that the Starlink constellation performed about 300,000 collision avoidance maneuvers in 2025 alone. This corresponds to almost 40 maneuvers per satellite over 12 months. The number is astonishing, considering that, before Starlink, any given satellite could perform only a handful of evasive maneuvers each year.
So far, so good; despite the astronomically increasing numbers, the number of Starlink satellite collisions is zero. But some worry that it’s only a matter of time before such a smashup occurs, especially as other mega-constellations gather rapidly. “Our ability to continue using orbit depends on Starlink continuing to function perfectly,” said Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan. – It certainly makes me nervous.
It hasn’t all gone smoothly. In July 2024, a 2.5 kilogram piece of a deliberately deorbited Starlink satellite survived re-entry into the atmosphere and plummeted onto a farm in Canada. In December 2025, China reported a near miss between one of its satellites and a Starlink satellite. That same month, a Starlink satellite exploded in orbit, ejecting dozens of debris, although no collision in space was to blame. In its December 2025 report to the FCC, SpaceX said it had identified the cause of the explosion and removed the parts responsible from subsequent Starlink satellites. The climatic effects of multiple Starlink satellites burning up in our atmosphere each day also remain poorly understood and could change the temperature of the stratosphere.
Apart from the big challenge of managing so many satellites in orbit, the big problem with mega-constellations is that they have a continuous effect on astronomy. Interference from Starlink and other satellites has already become frustratingly routine for astronomers, hampering science as celestial objects are obscured, and the problem is only going to get worse. A study led by Alejandro Borlaff at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California and published last December found that adding half a million satellites to Earth’s orbit would result in at least one of them disturbingly photobombing nearly every image taken by every telescope on Earth—and many images from telescopes in space. For stargazers, the forecast is terrifying: “There’s no place in the sky that won’t have some satellites,” Borlaff says. Even putting all future astronomical observatories into orbit, as some have suggested, offers no escape.
Such figures are not merely speculative; Starlink’s milestone of 10,000 satellites actively in orbit is just the beginning of our new relationship with Earth’s orbit. From Internet mega-constellations alone, tens of thousands of satellites are slated for launch in the coming years, while Musk recently announced plans to launch an eye-watering million satellites for a new artificial intelligence data center into orbit using SpaceX’s massive new Starship rocket. In total, there are currently 1.7 million satellites proposed to be launched worldwide.
Exactly how many satellites the Earth’s orbit can accommodate before collisions become inevitable is unclear. A study in 2022 suggested that millions of satellites could be achievable, but other experts believe the number is closer to 100,000. Such numbers may seem unfathomable, but 10,000 satellites did not so long ago. “I never thought we’d have constellations with thousands of satellites,” says Victoria Samson, director of space security and stability at the Secure World Foundation in Washington, D.C. “So I wouldn’t say ‘never.’
Today there are more than 10,000 satellites from SpaceX and counting. Next week alone there are five planned Starlink launches. Earth’s orbit, once free of man-made machines just 70 years ago, is getting busier and busier. Can we make it?
