The Crowded Skies: Overcrowded by Satellites Orbiting Earth

For most of the space age, the sky above us was almost empty. In 1990 a few hundred working satellites circled the Earth. By the end of 2019 the number had reached about two thousand, and that felt like a lot. Then, in the space of roughly six years, everything changed. Today more than sixteen thousand active satellites orbit the planet, and new ones are arriving faster than at any point in history. This book is an attempt to make sense of that change while it is still happening. It is not a history of rocketry, nor a technical manual. It is a field guide to the machines overhead: how many there are, what they do, where they fly, who owns them, and where the whole enterprise is heading. The aim is to give a clear and honest picture of a sky that has become, in a very short time, one of the most crowded and contested environments humanity has ever built.