Mankind has invested a lot in satellites and not just money. Yes, the most expensive satellites can cost nearly a billion dollars, but the bigger investment comes in our reliance on this orbiting technology. Television broadcasts, navigation systems, weather forecasts and many forms of financial exchange rely on satellites to function. If all of Earth’s satellites were to suddenly shut down, international communications systems would begin to fail, transportation would grind to a halt, clocks would become out of sync, and global supply chains would collapse. It’s a scenario fit for a disaster movie, but unfortunately, it’s also a very real danger. It could take just one solar storm or a single software bug to destroy every satellite in less than a week.
The number of satellites in orbit has grown exponentially, especially since the introduction of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites. As of January 2026, there are about 15,000 satellites in orbit, about two-thirds of which are Starlink. As space around Earth becomes more crowded, satellites must make increasingly frequent maneuvers to avoid colliding with each other. It’s gotten to the point where only SpaceX is doing collision avoidance maneuvers every two minutes. However, if SpaceX or any other satellite operator were to lose contact with its technology due to, say, a solar storm or a software bug, it would be unable to perform the necessary escapes. This could trigger a series of domino-like crashes that knock out all of Earth’s satellites in just a few days.
Read more: Here’s how NASA plans to deorbit the ISS
Scientific attempts to measure the risk of collisions with satellites
array of satellite dishes at night – Bjdlzx/Getty Images
Scientists have been concerned about this risk since the first satellites were launched at the height of the Space Race. In 1978, NASA scientist Donald Kessler published a paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research warning of the growing risk of satellites colliding with each other and creating a debris belt around Earth that would block our access to space. This, in turn, gave rise to the term “Kessler syndrome,” a loosely defined scenario in which low-Earth orbit becomes so overcrowded with satellites that a single collision would trigger another, and another, and so on. Lose one satellite… lose them all.
Kessler created mathematical models to demonstrate the risk, but of course that didn’t stop companies from producing more and more satellites. In light of a new reality, Princeton University graduate student Sarah Thiele and her colleagues have devised a new way to measure risk, called the Collision Realization And Significant Harm (CRASH) Clock. The CRASH clock uses satellite position data to estimate the time it would take for a catastrophic collision between satellites to occur if the ability to perform evasive maneuvers were lost. As of this writing, the CRASH clock is only 5.5 days away. That means less than a week for satellite engineers to avert disaster. What’s even scarier is how quickly the risk has advanced. In 2018, before Starlink’s satellite megaconstellations were introduced, the CRASH clock was at 164 days.
Past accidents serve as a warning
illustration of low earth orbit overcrowded with satellites – CGD Shahidul/Shutterstock
The CRASH watch is perhaps the clearest warning yet of how quickly we are approaching a Kessler syndrome scenario. In less than a decade, the clock went from five and a half months to just five and a half days, a frightening increase in danger. Nor is the risk just hypothetical. A growing sample of real collisions and outages highlights the fragility of our satellite systems. Studies show that solar storms are already interfering with some satellites, increasing the drag forces they experience in orbit. This does not bode well for the possibility of an extra-strong solar storm, for which there is priority.
On May 19, 1998, the Galaxy IV communications satellite failed following a period of intense solar flares. The loss of the satellite disabled 80-90% of all pagers on the North American continent. It was the late 90s and pagers ruled the world, especially in the medical field where doctors and nurses relied on them for emergency calls. Suddenly, those critical medical professionals could not be reached. Meanwhile, NPR, CBS and the Chinese television network lost their signals. Fortunately, services were able to reconnect via other satellites, but that was almost 30 years ago, and space was much less crowded. If the same event happened today, Galaxy IV would not have gone out, but would probably have crashed into the adjacent satellites, knocking everything down like a house of cards.
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