Orbit 否认计划部署 126 万颗数据中心卫星

TL;DR

Orbit is already crowded. About 16,000 to 17,000 working satellites and roughly 35,000 to 47,000 tracked objects, depending on who's counting. Starlink alone dodged collisions over 355,000 times in a year.

It's getting worse fast. If every satellite stopped dodging, a likely collision would come in about 2.2 days. In 2018 that was 164 days. ESA says the long-term health of orbit got ten times worse in a single year.

Now five companies want to add 1.26 million data center satellites. That's 75 to 80 times what's working up there today. None are approved yet, and all five asked to skip the usual deployment deadlines.

The physics doesn't play nice. Space doesn't cool things for free, the chips weren't built for radiation, and nothing up there can be repaired. One expert model says four of the five plans risk runaway debris on their own.

Astronomers say the limit is about 100,000 faint satellites, total. The proposals blow straight past that.

The bottom line: a bit of computing on satellites already going up makes sense. A million-satellite land grab doesn't. These decisions are happening at the FCC right now, and hardly anyone is watching.

Every number below is linked to its source, and where sources disagree, I show both.

Low Earth orbit is already so crowded that Starlink's satellites alone dodge something roughly every 90 seconds, and the current big idea is to add over a million more of them. For AI. Obviously.

The pitch goes like this: data centers on the ground are eating power grids, drinking water, and annoying everyone who lives near them. Space has free solar power, it's freezing cold, and nobody files a noise complaint from orbit. So shove the GPUs up there and call it the future.

It sounds clever right up until you look at what's already circling the planet. So let's do that first, then we'll get to the bit where the physics laughs at the pitch deck.

Why the numbers in this post don't all match

Every figure here links to where it came from, and you'll notice they don't always agree. Trying to make sense form it all here:

Where sources disagree, I show the range and who said what. If anything, the spread proves the point: nobody has a perfect picture of what's up there.

Orbit is already a car park

Depending on who's counting, there are roughly 15,900 to 16,900 working satellites in orbit right now. That's up from about 2,000 in 2019 (Orbital Radar).

The sources broadly agree on one thing: about two in three of those are Starlink. McDowell counted 11,143 working Starlinks out of the 16,914.

Working satellites are the minority of what's up there. Add dead satellites, spent rocket stages and shrapnel, and the tracked total is somewhere between 35,000 and 47,000 objects:

ESA counts everything regularly tracked by surveillance networks, while KeepTrack works from the public catalogue. I couldn't find a breakdown of exactly what makes up the gap, so treat the honest answer as "somewhere in that range".

And "tracked" only covers things roughly 10 cm and up. Everything smaller is a model estimate, and ESA revised its own model this year:

Sources: ESA statistics page, 2025 snapshot and ESA statistics, Oct 2026, via New Space Economy. If an article tells you "1.2 million", it's quoting last year. At orbital speed, a centimetre-sized fragment can wreck a satellite.

The pace isn't slowing either. ESA counted more than 300 launches and over 4,000 new payloads in 2025 alone, about ten new satellites a day (ESA Space Environment Report 2026).

Everything up there is constantly dodging

Starlink satellites made 207,152 collision-avoidance manoeuvres between December 2025 and May 2026, and over 355,000 across the full year (Space.com). That works out to each satellite firing its thrusters to get out of the way roughly once a week.

To be fair to SpaceX, part of this is them being extra careful. Starlink dodges whenever the collision risk tops 3 in 10 million, while most operators wait until it reaches 1 in 10,000 (Space.com). How much stricter that is depends on who's doing the maths: you'll see "100 times" in some write-ups and "300 times" in others (KeepTrack). Run it yourself and it's about 330. SpaceX reports no collisions so far.

The catch: debris expert Hugh Lewis points out each dodge still leaves roughly a one-in-a-million chance of a hit. Make a million dodges and that leftover risk adds up . He expects Starlink to pass a million total manoeuvres around mid-2027, and to be making over a million a year by 2030 (Space.com).

One more source clash worth knowing: SpaceX's year-end summary put 2024 at about 200,000 manoeuvres (KeepTrack), but the half-year reports in the chart add up to roughly half that. Either way the line only goes one direction.

Then there's the uncomfortable question of what happens when the dodging stops. Researchers from Princeton, UBC and the University of Regina built a metric for exactly that, the CRASH Clock: if every satellite lost the ability to manoeuvre at once, how long until a likely collision between tracked objects? Their official tracker puts it at 2.2 days as of 15 August 2026, down from 164 days in January 2018 (Outer Space Institute). Along the way it read 5.5 days in June 2025, 3.8 days in January 2026 and 2.5 days in May 2026, all on the same tracker using the same method. It only counts objects big enough to track, so if anything it a bit optimistic.

If you go digging you'll also see 2.8 days quoted for the end of 2025, alongside a different 2018 starting figure (Live Science). Those appear to come from an earlier version of the study, which the team has since revised after feedback from other researchers (preprint). They don't line up with the tracker's series, so don't mix the two. Either way the story is the same: the safety margin has collapsed.

What would make every satellite stop manoeuvring at once? A big enough solar storm. During the May 2024 Gannon storm, the swollen upper atmosphere dragged satellites down, automated station-keeping kicked in (mostly Starlink's), and nearly half of all active satellites in LEO manoeuvred at once (Parker & Linares, Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets). Those weren't collision dodges, but mass movement like that scrambles everyone's orbit predictions at the worst time. A Carrington-class storm would be far worse. We've built a system with roughly a two-day margin for error and pointed it at the Sun.

Kessler syndrome isn't sci-fi any more

ESA boils the long-term health of orbit down to one number, the Space Environment Health Index. It projects the combined long-term effect of everything in orbit and compares it with a 2014 benchmark scenario in which debris rules are followed well. A score of 1 is sustainable. Anything higher means that many times more strain on the orbital environment than is sustainable. Last year's report put us at about 4. This year's, based on data to the end of 2025, put us at about 50 (ESA). In ESA's words, already-unsustainable behaviour got an order of magnitude worse in a single year. One caveat: ESA's public pages don't spell out whether the index was calculated over exactly the same time horizon both years, so treat the jump as ESA's own headline figure rather than a lab-precise comparison.

ESA also cut its long-range forecast from 200 years to 100, and the shorter forecast still came out worse than last year's longer one. Its conclusion: debris would keep growing even if we never launched another satellite, and actively removing old junk is now required, not optional (ESA Space Environment Report 2026).

That runaway is Kessler syndrome: one collision makes a cloud of fragments, those fragments hit other satellites, which makes more fragments, and so on until whole orbital bands become unusable. It wouldn't happen overnight like in Gravity. It's a slow grind that makes orbits progressively more expensive and dangerous until people stop using them.

Altitude matters a lot. Debris around 550 km, where most of Starlink lives, drags down and burns up within a few years. Debris at 800 km hangs around for decades. That band is still littered with leftovers from China's 2007 anti-satellite test and the 2009 Iridium-Cosmos collision (TechSpot). Remember that when we get to where the data center constellations want to fly.

And it's not only old junk. On 29 March 2026, Starlink 34343 broke apart at about 560 km, throwing out tens of trackable fragments (Tom's Hardware). It was the second Starlink breakup in about three months, after Starlink 35956 in December 2025, and neither appears to have been caused by a collision (SmallSat News). Fair's fair: at that altitude the fragments were expected to fall out of orbit within weeks (SpaceNews summary). But it shows even the "best-run" constellation produces debris it didn't plan for.

The report also added a new metric this year: the risk of reentering junk hurting someone on the ground. It's still small, but it's rising because so much more is coming down. ESA counts more than three intact satellites or rocket bodies reentering every day (ESA).

The one bit of good news: controlled rocket-body reentries have outnumbered uncontrolled ones for the second year running, and ESA credits the switch from a 25-year to a 5-year disposal target for shortening how long dead hardware hangs around. Credit where it's due ish.

Now add a million data centers

Five companies have asked the FCC for permission to launch a combined 1,259,600 data center satellites. That's roughly 75 to 80 times the number of working satellites in orbit today, depending on whose count you use.

Why coverage gets the dates muddled: FCC file numbers have a date baked in that often isn't the filing date. SpaceX's file number says 8 January, but the FCC's own notice says it was filed on 30 January. Cowboy's says 23 March, but the FCC lists it as filed on 11 May, and some outlets report 14 May (SatNews). Add in outlets mixing up "filed" and "accepted", and you get reports that disagree by weeks. The dates above come from FCC notices wherever I could find them; Cowboy's acceptance date comes from secondary reporting.

All five have been accepted for filing. That only means the FCC found the paperwork complete enough to open for public comment. It is not an approval.

To be clear, these are maximums. Nobody is launching 1.26 million satellites next year. But a licence for a million is a licence for a million, and all five applicants asked the FCC to waive its milestone rule (section 25.164), which normally requires half a constellation to be up within six years and all of it within nine (SpaceX, Starcloud, Orbital, Blue Origin, Cowboy). SpaceX, Starcloud and Orbital also asked to skip the surety bond that normally backs that promise. That's asking for the land grab or well the space grab without the deadline. Rules for thee type thing.

Some of the attitude on show: SpaceX's filing calls the project a first step toward a Kardashev II civilisation (The Register). Musk's take on crowding was that space is "really big" so it won't get crowded (Gizmodo). The entire first half of this post is the answer to that. Clearly its already crowded.

Google is going about it more quietly. Its Project Suncatcher prototype, built with Planet, went up on a SpaceX rocket on 1 October 2026 carrying four of Google's TPU chips. Because of heat limits, the chips can only run Google's Gemma model for 15 minutes at a time, and Google's project lead says the radiators are one of the heaviest parts of the satellite (same NPR report). For scale, four TPUs is roughly the compute of one server in a normal data center (Washington Post, via Hawaii Tribune-Herald). There's no mega-constellation filing from Google.

As of early November 2026, I could find no FCC approval for any orbital data center constellation (Broadband Breakfast). The SpaceX application alone drew nearly 1,500 public comments (ESO), and Amazon and Viasat both asked the FCC to reject it (DCD). But F