On a cloudless night in August, I lay back in a lawn chair and tilted it towards the sky. It was the peak of the Perseid meteor shower, promising up to 100 shooting stars an hour. I only saw about a dozen, but for every meteor I saw, there were dozens of much slower, less spectacular objects drifting across the night sky.
It had been nearly 10 years since I last spent time properly stargazing, and the change was staggering. There are now more than 18,000 active satellites orbiting Earth, up from just over 1,000 a decade ago. And it got me wondering: what are they all doing up there?
Last year, there were a record 4,510 objects launched into space (see chart below), surpassing the previous peak of 2,903 set in 2023. The vast majority are communications satellites that form megaconstellations like SpaceX’s Starlink, which beam high-speed internet to users on the ground.
Others support everything from GPS navigation and weather forecasting, to scientific experiments and wildlife conservation. A small portion are designed for military purposes, including satellites that are used to spy on other satellites in close-up proximity operations.
It has raised concerns about light pollution for astronomers and space debris. In the worst-case scenario a runaway chain reaction known as the Kessler syndrome could see cascading collisions create a cloud of debris so dense that launching rockets becomes impossible – effectively trapping us on Earth.
There are approximately 16,500 active satellites in low Earth orbit as of September 2026, according to the latest figures from CelesTrak’s catalogue, which may seem like a lot but it is actually fairly manageable. On a typical day there could be anywhere between 10,000 and 20,000 planes in the sky at any one time, and even at these much lower altitudes there is still plenty of space.
But it’s about to get much more crowded up there – and what comes next could reach into the realms of science fiction.
Elon Musk, who already controls two thirds of all active satellites through SpaceX’s Starlink, has applied to launch one million satellites to provide the processing power for artificial intelligence. SpaceX’s request with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) claims it would be the “first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization”, referencing an idea first conceived in the 1960s by a Soviet astronomer.
According to the scale, a Type II civilisation can harness the entire energy output of the Sun in order to meet our energy needs. “Global electricity demand for AI simply cannot be met with terrestrial solutions, even in the near term, without imposing hardship on communities and the environment,” Musk wrote in February when announcing that SpaceX had merged with his AI firm xAI.
“The only logical solution therefore is to transport these resource-intensive efforts to a location with vast power and space… By directly harnessing near-constant solar power with little operating or maintenance costs, these satellites will transform our ability to scale compute.”
It’s worth noting that Earth is currently not even close to achieving a Type I civilisation on the Kardashev scale, which uses all of the available energy of a single planet, like geothermal or wind power. An author of a 2023 study that approximated where Earth sits on the Kardashev scale, recently told CNN that it would “likely take millennia” to just reach Type I status, unless a major breakthrough in something like nuclear fusion changed the trajectory.
Musk appears unfazed by such projections, having recently unveiled plans to build a $100 billion rocket launch facility in Louisiana to support his ambitions for a million-satellite constellation. The firm’s biggest complex yet – which is more than eight times the size of Manhattan – will be capable of launching thousands of Starship rockets each year, according to SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, with construction set to begin next year.
The SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy v3 Booster lift off on its 13th test flight from the SpaceX launch complex in Starbase, Texas, US, 24 July, 2026 (Reuters)
Each Starship rocket will be capable of delivering 200 ton to orbit, with SpaceX’s FCC filing setting a launch cadence target of one per hour. A recent analysis of the current global space race revealed that there is currently one rocket leaving Earth every 29 hours.
The massive launch rate increase, together with the sudden rise in orbital objects, have led to calls for a binding international coordination framework to protect low Earth orbit. “Reaching orbit is no longer simply a question of budget and engineering. The harder problem is what we leave behind,” Dean Sladen, an aerospace engineer at precision engineering firm Accu Components, which published the report, told The Independent.
“Debris that will outlast us by centuries, emissions we barely understand and a night sky no treaty protects. If the industry does not treat sustainability as a design requirement rather than an afterthought, we risk closing off the very orbits we are racing to fill.”
Other companies like Google have also announced plans to launch space-based data centres to scale AI. The US tech giant’s Project Suncatcher is set to launch the first prototype satellites early next year.
The plans have the support of the US President, with Donald Trump recently signing an executive order to enable 1,000 rocket launches per year on US soil – roughly five-times the current number.
With each launch capable of carrying dozens of satellites, orbital data centres could quickly fill the night sky – making it appear like there are more moving stars than stationary ones. If it’s another decade before I lay back to watch a meteor shower, by then the shooting stars may be little more than a sideshow.