State of orbit · live catalog data, refreshed 2026-10-02 00:20 UTC
There are 33,694 catalogued objects circling Earth right now and only about 16,412 of them are working satellites. The rest is junk moving at ten kilometres a second. ClearOrbit exists to make removing it a routine service, not a stunt.
Only about 16,412 of the 33,694 catalogued objects are working satellites; everything else is dead hardware, spent rocket stages and fragments, each moving at roughly 7.5 km/s. A one-centimetre fragment carries the energy of a hand grenade, and there are about 1.5 million of them that nobody can track. The catalog counts tell you how crowded the tracked population is; the modelled counts tell you how much of the danger is invisible.
Catalog figures are recomputed every six hours from the GCAT catalog (J. McDowell, planet4589.org), which mirrors the US Space Force public catalog. Modelled figures are ESA MASTER-8 estimates (Feb 2026), because objects smaller than about 10 cm cannot be tracked individually. See every source · How tracking works · Why crowding compounds
The catalog has not gained or lost an object in three days. The only figures that moved today moved backwards, as four old decays slid off the far end of the rolling window.
All briefings →ESA's 2026 Space Environment Report says the expected number of objects and collisions in low Earth orbit is "skyrocketing in a runaway effect", and that active debris removal "must become part of the solution and soon". Its long-term risk index moved from about 4 to about 50 times the sustainability threshold in a single year. Read the digest.
No mission has yet captured and removed a real, uncooperative piece of large debris. The first attempts are scheduled for 2027 and 2028. Here is where things really stand.
Future-looking, hour-by-hour and year-by-year forecasts grounded in real data.
In this scenario a severe geomagnetic storm thickens the air at 400 kilometres, thousands of satellites move at once, and for four days nobody can say where anything is.
A satellite broke up in a rare 142-degree retrograde orbit in September 2026. Its fragments meet everything else head-on, and they may stay for centuries.
The same operator, the same Tuesday in 2035, but in a world that began removing 5-10 large derelicts a year from 2028 and raised disposal compliance.
How each class of debris can actually be cleared, and how ready each method is.
Most debris-creating breakups are not collisions. They are leftover fuel, pressurant and batteries, going off years after the mission ended.
Two derelicts at the same altitude can be effectively unreachable from one another. The reason is geometry, and it decides which debris a removal mission can afford to visit.
Grappling a dead, uncooperative rocket stage with a robotic arm is the flagship method of debris removal. Nobody has done it yet. Here is how it works and who is about to try.
Reentry is the disposal plan for almost everything in low orbit. It is not a disappearance: it is a transfer of several thousand tonnes a year into the upper atmosphere.
Two objects from the same 1985 launch are now 470 km apart in altitude. Altitude alone never set the clock; area-to-mass ratio and the Sun do most of the work.
A readable digest of ESA's Space Environment Report 2026 and the numbers behind it: a record catalog, a crowded model, daily re-entries and a health index 50 times over target.
Every number here carries its source and its date, and the plan is open to be argued with. Get each new piece by email, and send us what we got wrong.