The November issue of Harpers has an article Ad Astra - it's probably behind a paywall. The main thrust of the article is on the prospect of war over "rights" in space. But they also have a bit about the crowding of space.
A short excerpt:
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All this comes at a time of exponential growth in the commercial use of space. When Russia launched the first man-made satellite, Sputnik 1, from a cosmodrome on the Kazakh steppe in 1957, the small aluminum sphere entered a near abyss. But the orbital belts surrounding Earth are now a crowded highway of around seven thousand satellites, moving at speeds of up to seventeen thousand miles an hour. Many of these machines are used for both civilian and military purposes. Three thousand of them are no longer in operation, and travel alongside around fifteen thousand pieces of space debris sizable enough to observe from Earth: the shrapnel of blasted satellites, old rocket boosters, and more, including items lost during space walks (a camera, a blanket, a spatula). U.S. Space Command tracks this dreck, alongside satellites, and alerts operators around the world when objects are due to collide. Though actual crashes are rare, the military now issues more than a hundred thousand of these warnings each day. Those who study the subject commonly describe the current play of space as “congested, contested, and competitive.”
The vast majority of satellites are split between the two most useful zones around the earth: the more accessible low Earth orbit (LEO), which begins about five hundred kilometers from the planet’s surface and is ideal for telecommunications and imaging, and geosynchronous orbit (GEO), thirty-six thousand kilometers away, where satellites move more slowly and in time with the earth’s rotation, making them stationary relative to given points on the planet and ideal for meteorology. Elon Musk’s broadband project, Starlink, is currently veiling the world in a mega-constellation of new satellites. As of this May, Starlink has launched more than 1,700 of them into LEO. These now make up over a quarter of all functional satellites orbiting Earth. According to Hugh Lewis, an astronautics researcher in the United Kingdom, they account for roughly half of all close calls—cases in which objects have passed within one kilometer of each other.3
Musk’s company SpaceX launched its first civilian passenger flight this September, reaching nearly five hundred and eighty kilometers above sea level—far higher than the voyages of fellow billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, who each traveled to the edge of the earth’s atmosphere this summer. Branson went first, on the spaceplane VSS Unity, reaching eighty kilometers above the planet’s surface, the distance at which the Air Force considers a traveler an astronaut. Bezos took off second, in a reusable rocket called the New Shepard, to one hundred kilometers above sea level—what’s called the Kármán line, another commonly used boundary for space. A representative for Bezos’s Blue Origin venture says the company will be ready to take more tourists to space at the end of this year; Branson’s Virgin Galactic claims the same for 2022. All three men—Bezos, Branson, and Musk—use the loftiest language to describe their ambitions for the void. (Musk, for his part, wants humans to become a “multi-planet species.”) Each sees a new type of prestige past the horizon, as well as extraordinary sums of money.
Competition for position on the useful orbital belts is now steep. And that competition is its own signal of risk, says Jack Beard. “There’s never been a moment in human history where all these new possibilities of resources don’t lead to disagreements between states,” he said. “And unfortunately, military involvement is usually close behind.”
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