One Satellite Crash Could Upend Modern Life

Updated at 5:03 p.m. ET on June 14, 2024

Earlier this year, two satellites from two adversarial countries nearly collided while orbiting Earth at thousands of miles an hour. The first, an American spacecraft on a NASA mission to study the planet’s upper atmosphere, wasn’t built to maneuver in orbit. The second, a Russian surveillance spacecraft, was defunct, and thus uncontrollable. The only thing people on Earth could do was watch. Darren McKnight, a space-debris expert, stayed up all night on February 28, monitoring the trajectories of the satellites, which, combined, weighed several thousand pounds. “I felt very, very helpless,” McKnight told me.

According to LeoLabs, the U.S. space-tracking firm where McKnight works, the probability of collision that night was somewhere between 3 and 8 percent. That may not seem so terrible, but risk works a bit differently in the realm above Earth. Satellite trackers like McKnight start sounding of each other. At a recent conference, Pam Melroy, NASA’s deputy administrator, the near miss was “very shocking” and “really scared us.”