This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: If people ever think about cleaning up space debris, they typically think of something equivalent to a giant garbage truck in the sky, collecting lost astronaut tools and dead satellites, then hauling them back down to Earth to be deposited in a landfill. But dealing with space debris doesn't work that way, and a new paper by Dr.
Slava Turyshev of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, available as a preprint on arXiv, makes a good argument as to why. We typically cover Turyshev for his work on the solar gravitational lens idea. The study is published in the journal Acta Astronautica.
Turyshev has turned his attention to orbital debris at a critical juncture. According to filings made to the FCC, SpaceX, the company that runs the largest satellite megaconstellation, had its Starlink satellites perform 144,404 collision avoidance maneuvers in the six months from December 2024 through May 2025. Even accounting for the fact that there are more Starlink satellites in orbit now than ever, that means, on average, each one is having to dodge a potential crash every week.
Fortunately, Starlink satellites themselves aren't exactly in the "danger zone" of orbit. They typically orbit at around 500–600 kilometers (311–373 miles), along with other megaconstellations such as Amazon's Kuiper and China's Qianfan. In the paper, Turyshev separates these orbits from those higher up.
At 500–600 kilometers (311–373 miles), there is enough atmosphere left that the area is partly self-cleaning—dead satellites and debris in these orbits will burn up in a few years. Higher up, though, there are bigger problems, both literally and figuratively. At around 850 kilometers (528 miles), giant rocket stages from past launches lurk with no control and little to no atmosphere to drag them down in a reasonable time frame.
They could stay in orbit for decades or centuries and don't have any means of avoiding one another. When they inevitably collide, they will spray debris not only into their own orbit but also into higher and lower ones, potentially causing even greater problems for the lower-orbiting communications megaconstellations. According to European Space Agency data cited in the paper, about 96% of the long-term collision risk comes from these dead objects.
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