Why the Orbital Environment Is the Infrastructure Problem of the Century
More than 43,000 tracked objects larger than 10 centimetres now travel through low Earth orbit, alongside an estimated 1.2 million untracked fragments between 1 and 10 centimetres, too small to catalogue and too large to shield against. This paper lays out the state of Earth's orbital environment and the forces driving its deterioration: the scale and distribution of the debris population, the mechanics of the Kessler cascade and how close the environment sits to that threshold, the history of catastrophic fragmentation events, and what continued neglect would mean for every institution that now depends on orbital infrastructure.
Published by Qontra Research · Orbital Sustainability Research Unit · Policy Research Unit