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Every object humans have put around Earth since 1957, from Sputnik to last week's Starlinks. There are nearly 34,000 of them in orbit today, and just over half are dead: old satellites, spent rocket stages and the fragments of explosions and collisions. Drag the globe, scrub through time, switch on Live to see where they are right now, and open any light to see what it is.
Most objects sit in low Earth orbit, below 2,000 km, where one lap takes about 90 minutes. GPS flies in the middle, about 20,200 km up, lapping twice a day. The geostationary ring, 35,786 km over the equator, takes exactly one day, so satellites there hover over one spot. That ring is the one you can see on the globe.
Only the thin upper atmosphere pulls a dead satellite down, and it thins fast with height. Move the satellite to see how long NASA says debris at that height lasts.
Source: NASA Orbital Debris Program Office. Below 600 km, debris falls back within several years; at 800 km, often centuries; above 1,000 km, a thousand years or more.
When two objects hit at about 10 km/s, they shatter into hundreds of fragments. Each fragment can hit something else. Scientists call a runaway version of this the Kessler syndrome.
Shrink Earth to a basketball. The Space Station would circle about 8 mm above its surface, and the geostationary ring would sit about 67 cm away. A whole satellite would be smaller than a bacterium.
So every dot on the globe is drawn thousands of times bigger than the thing it stands for. Real neighbours in low orbit are typically tens to hundreds of kilometres apart. Orbit will never look like the wall of junk in WALL-E. The danger is quieter: it is the collisions.
Year-end counts; the last point is 24 Sep 2026. Source: GCAT, J. McDowell.
Objects in orbit on 24 Sep 2026, by type.
Objects in orbit on 24 Sep 2026, by the state responsible in GCAT. "Soviet Union" covers objects launched before 1992.
Data: the General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects (GCAT) by astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, data update 24 Sep 2026, licensed CC-BY-4.0. It includes every catalogued object in Earth orbit since 1957: 69,761 objects, 33,858 still up. Counts were cross-checked against CelesTrak's copy of the U.S. Space Force catalogue and NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office.
Working vs dead: a satellite counts as working until GCAT's end-of-operations date. Rocket stages, components and fragments are dead from the start.
What is real on the globe: each object's height, orbit shape and tilt come from the catalogue. Where along its orbit it sits, and how its orbit is turned around the pole, are illustrative, because the catalogue does not record them. Heights are stretched so that low orbit is visible; the Orbits 101 panel shows the true scale.
The Space Station and Hubble are shown from their own orbits and are not in the count, because their catalogue histories continue outside the main catalogue.
Sketches are original line drawings, not to scale.
Data from GCAT (J. McDowell, planet4589.org/space/gcat). Visualization: Andre, The Visible Data.
https://thevisibledata.com/projects/orbit-explorer© Andre · The Visible Data