There are now around 9 900 active satellites orbiting the Earth, with the vast majority in the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) band. The lion’s share belongs to Starlink, which has 6 219, but it’s aiming to get 42 000 up there. And then there’s Amazon’s Project Kuiper, which is behind in the race, but eventually wants to have 3 236 satellites in its constellation.

Elon Musk is on record as saying that there was room for “tens of billions” of satellites in Low Earth Orbit, but it’s unclear how safe this will be. What is certain is that there are going to be a lot more satellites, mostly for broadband communications, which have a five-year lifespan.