The rapid increase in satellites and space junk will make low Earth orbit unusable unless companies and countries cooperate and share the data needed to manage that most accessible region of space, experts and industry insiders said.
A United Nations panel on space traffic coordination in late October determined that urgent action was necessary and called for a comprehensive shared database of orbital objects as well as an international framework to track and manage them.
More than 14,000 satellites, including some 3,500 inactive ones, surround the globe in low orbit, data from U.S.-based Slingshot Aerospace showed. Alongside those are about 120 million pieces of debris from launches, collisions and wear-and-tear of which only a few thousand are large enough to track.
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