The AEI Space Data Navigator: Launches, Satellites, and Orbital Debris in the Third Space Age

Key Takeaways

• The Space Data Navigator makes complex orbital data accessible to general audiences.
• SpaceX’s dominance in launches and satellites has fundamentally shifted the global market.
• Orbital debris from ASAT tests and abandoned rocket bodies is accumulating faster than it decays.

An Open Window Into a Crowded Sky

By the time 2024 ended, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 had conducted 52 percent of every orbital launch on Earth and had delivered 84 percent of all satellite mass sent to orbit during the year. Numbers like those tell a striking story about concentration of power in the space industry, but most people have no practical way to examine them in context, compare them across countries and time periods, or explore the broader patterns they’re part of. That’s the gap the AEI Space Data Navigator was built to close.

The Navigator is a free, interactive online platform hosted by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington, D.C.-based policy research organization. It organizes publicly available data on orbital launches, satellite populations, and space debris into charts and visualizations that anyone with a web browser can explore and download. The tool was created and is maintained by Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at AEI and a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose research focuses on defense budgets, space policy, and the geopolitical competition unfolding in orbit above Earth.

The platform is organized around three interactive modules. The Launch Explorer allows users to compare launch activity across countries, vehicles, and sites over any selected time period, with charts available for download. The Satellite Explorer tracks how satellite constellations are growing and changing, with filters for country, mission type, constellation program, orbital regime, and ownership category. The Debris Explorer shows how orbital debris accumulates, decays, and changes after specific events such as weapons tests and rocket body explosions. A supporting About page documents the tool’s data sources, definitions, and limitations openly, which is not universal practice in policy research.

Harrison has also added a feature called ASK HAL, an AI assistant embedded in the Space Data Navigator’s main landing page. It translates natural-language questions directly into customized charts drawn from the underlying dataset. A user can type questions like “Which orbit has the most space debris?” or “Compare military satellites for China, Russia, and the US,” and the assistant generates a relevant visualization in real time. Harrison has described it publicly as imperfect but functional most of the time. Whether or not the chart generation is always accurate, the inclusion of an AI query interface signals that the Navigator is designed for broad public engagement, not just expert audiences who already know what they’re looking for.

The tool isn’t a static publication. It updates continuously and serves as the empirical backbone for Harrison’s published research at AEI, including his May 2024 report Building an Enduring Advantage in the Third Space Age, which drew on the Navigator’s datasets to make quantitative arguments about US competitive position in space. The decision to make the underlying data publicly accessible alongside policy analysis is relatively uncommon in the national security research community, and it makes the Navigator’s findings replicable and contestable in ways that purely classified or proprietary analysis is not.

Three Eras, One Framework

Harrison’s approach to understanding current space activity is grounded in a historical framework that divides the entire history of human spaceflight into three distinct eras. That framework isn’t just a rhetorical device. It’s the structural lens that gives the Space Data Navigator’s numbers their context, and understanding it helps explain why a record of 211 successful orbital launches in 2023 represents a genuine historical inflection rather than a continuation of pre-existing trends.

The first space age, in Harrison’s periodization, ran from 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, to 1990. It was defined by state-led competition and exploration. Both superpowers poured vast national resources into space programs motivated by Cold War rivalry rather than commercial logic. The Apollo program, the Space Shuttle, and the foundational architecture of the International Space Station all belong to this era. Launch rates were high by the standards of the time, but participation was limited, payloads were large and expensive, and access to orbit remained a state prerogative in nearly every country.

The second space age covers 1991 to 2015. It brought more participants into the market, including commercial satellite operators in communications and Earth observation, and it saw the first serious development of commercial launch services. But innovation was slow, launch costs stayed high, and the overall pace of change stagnated compared with what came before or after. The annual global launch rate during this period was a fraction of what the third space age would eventually produce.

The third space age, which Harrison dates from 2016 to the present, is defined by rapid commercialization and proliferation. The starting point corresponds closely with SpaceX achieving operational scale with its reusable launch system. The ability to land and refly orbital-class rocket boosters changed the fundamental economics of access to orbit. As launch costs fell, new business models became viable, and what followed is visible in every dataset the Space Data Navigator tracks: orbital launch rates at historic highs, satellite counts growing exponentially, and the orbital environment filling up faster than international debris mitigation frameworks were designed to handle.

This three-part framework is not unique to Harrison, but the Space Data Navigator makes it empirically grounded in a way that most policy writing is not. The charts generated by the Launch Explorer, for instance, make visually immediate what took years of incremental data gathering to confirm: the global launch rate in 2023 was not a gradual continuation of a long-term trend. It was a step change with a specific cause.

What the Launch Explorer Reveals

The global annual launch rate hit 211 successful orbital launches in 2023, an all-time record. The United States accounted for 103 of those launches, China for 66, each hitting their own national highs for the same year. When Harrison’s analysis shifts from raw launch counts to what he calls “effective launch capacity,” which accounts for how much payload mass each vehicle can actually carry to orbit, the US advantage becomes even more pronounced. The United States comprised approximately 81 percent of global effective launch capacity in 2023, roughly four times the rest of the world combined.

The Falcon 9’s 2024 performance reinforces why this matters. SpaceX completed 134 Falcon family launches during the year, comprising 132 Falcon 9 missions and two Falcon Heavy flights. That represented roughly a 40 percent increase over its 2023 cadence. Even stripping out all Starlink missions, which constitute SpaceX’s self-generated launch demand, Falcon 9 still accounted for 26 percent of global launches, 44 percent of satellites launched, and 46 percent of mass to orbit in 2024. No other vehicle on Earth comes close to that performance across all three measures simultaneously.

Rocket Lab’s Electron had an impressive 2024 by the standards of the small-launch segment, completing 15 missions. For a dedicated small satellite launcher, that cadence represents strong commercial health. But when measured in total mass delivered to orbit, Electron’s share is negligible alongside the Falcon 9. Harrison’s published analysis on this point is blunt: small launch providers are fighting for the margins of a market that is structurally moving toward higher-capacity reusable vehicles. The economics of orbital access increasingly favor the operators who can amortize development costs across the largest possible number of flights and kilograms.

China’s launch activity, while second in the world by volume, showed signs of leveling off in 2024. The Long March 2 and Long March 4 series both saw their launch rates decline from 2023 levels. Chinese commercial launch startups, including companies like Galactic Energy and LandSpace, are working to develop their own reusable vehicles, but they’re operating at a fraction of SpaceX’s scale and have not yet matched its operational tempo. The structural disadvantage China faces in effective launch capacity has less to do with engineering talent, which is considerable, and more to do with the economics of reusability. SpaceX’s booster recovery and reuse program has enabled dramatically lower per-launch costs that competing operators, state or commercial, have not replicated at scale.

Looking forward, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket entered service in 2025, adding a new heavy-lift reusable vehicle to the US launch fleet. SpaceX’s Starship, a fully reusable super-heavy launch vehicle with a payload capacity to low Earth orbit that dwarfs every vehicle currently flying, has been progressing through a test flight program aimed at operational status. If Starship achieves routine service, it would enable payloads far larger than current fairing constraints allow, new satellite designs optimized for mass and power rather than volume, and per-kilogram launch costs that could be significantly lower than Falcon 9 already achieves. AEI’s research argues that the introduction of super-heavy reusable vehicles represents a potentially decisive expansion of the US lead in effective launch capacity.

Satellite Populations and the Starlink Effect

The Satellite Explorer presents one of the starkest pictures in the entire Space Data Navigator: the Starlink effect on global satellite populations. As of the end of 2024, the United States held nearly three times as many operational satellites as all other countries combined. That gap exists almost entirely because of a single constellation operated by a single company. SpaceX’s Starlink constellation accounted for approximately 65 percent of all operational satellites in space by the end of 2024.

The scale is worth sitting with. According to orbital tracker Jonathan McDowell, SpaceX had approximately 6,895 Starlink satellites on orbit as of January 2, 2025, of which 2,822 were the newer V2 Mini variant, which SpaceX says can handle four times more data than the previous generation. By mid-2025, SpaceX reported more than six million Starlink customers globally, up from 4.6 million at the close of 2024, reflecting an average of roughly 200,000 new subscribers per month. The constellation spans 118 countries, territories, and markets.

Amazon’s Kuiper constellation, which plans to deploy more than 3,200 satellites to provide broadband internet access to underserved markets, had begun its deployment phase by 2025 and represents the most credible near-term competitor to Starlink in the commercial broadband satellite sector. Chinese companies have announced ambitious mega-constellation plans of their own, but they’re starting from a position well behind Starlink’s operational scale and revenue base. The US lead in commercial satellite communications continued to widen through 2024 and into 2025, and the trajectory of new deployments suggests it will keep doing so.

Military and Intelligence Satellites: A Turning Point

For years, the trend lines for military and intelligence satellites told a story of China steadily narrowing the gap with the United States. The Space Data Navigator’s data for 2024 suggests that trend may have reversed.

The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) began deploying a new proliferated satellite constellation in 2024, reportedly built on the Starlink satellite bus with sensors supplied by Northrop Grumman. The NRO launched more than 100 of these satellites in 2024 alone, significantly expanding US surveillance capacity and revisit rates. This architecture, sometimes called Starshield in open-source reporting, now represents a substantial share of US military and intelligence satellite capacity. Harrison’s analysis notes that the spike in US operational military and intelligence satellites visible in the Satellite Explorer’s time-series charts is primarily attributable to the NRO’s proliferated deployment, which had reached 201 satellites at the time of his January 2025 analysis.

In contrast, China’s deployment of military and intelligence satellites appears to have slowed during the same period. Harrison identifies 2024 as potentially the year the US military and intelligence community reversed the narrowing trend in this critical satellite category. Whether that reversal proves durable depends on whether the NRO and the Space Development Agency (SDA) can sustain their deployment tempo and on how quickly Chinese programs accelerate.

The SDA’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) is a separate, complementary initiative designed to provide tactical communications, missile warning, and data transport for US military operations. Unlike the NRO constellation, PWSA had not yet reached large-scale operational deployment as of early 2025, though launches were ramping up through the year. Harrison’s AEI report recommends deploying PWSA’s tactical ISR layer as a priority and beginning to use commercial ISR capabilities for combatant command support while the military constellation matures.

Commercial Remote Sensing: Where the US Is Losing Ground

Commercial remote sensing is the one sector where the Space Data Navigator’s satellite data shows a genuinely mixed competitive picture for the United States. By aggregate satellite count, Chinese commercial Earth observation companies pulled ahead during 2024, expanding their SAR and optical imaging constellations while the US count declined.

The primary driver of that decline was Planet Labs, which decommissioned approximately 117 satellites during 2024 while launching only 36 new ones. Planet has been shifting its strategy away from large swarms of lower-capability small satellites and toward fewer, higher-resolution platforms. That’s a defensible business and technical decision, but it shows up in the raw numbers as a meaningful drop in US commercial remote sensing capacity. Within the remote sensing sector, the United States continues to lead in radio frequency sensing satellites, a category dominated by HawkEye 360, which operates a fleet of satellites designed to detect and geolocate radio frequency emissions from ships, aircraft, and other emitters. Finland, rather than China or the United States, has the highest number of commercial synthetic aperture radar satellites, driven by ICEYE’s constellation.

Harrison’s assessment acknowledges that the US likely retains an advantage in individual satellite quality and imaging resolution that the raw constellation counts don’t fully capture. But he also notes, carefully, that quantity matters in remote sensing because it determines revisit rate, or how frequently a given location can be observed. A country or company with more satellites can observe any given point on Earth more often, which matters enormously for time-sensitive applications like tracking military movements, monitoring infrastructure construction, or supporting disaster response.

What Drives the Numbers

The satellite populations captured in the Satellite Explorer reflect the intersection of three demand curves that are all expanding simultaneously, each with its own logic and timeline. The commercial broadband market, led by Starlink and now joined by Kuiper, is deploying satellites at a pace that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. The military and intelligence community, recognizing that proliferated architectures with hundreds of smaller satellites are more survivable against counterspace threats than a small number of large expensive platforms, has shifted its procurement accordingly. And the commercial Earth observation market, which serves agricultural monitoring firms, defense contractors, shipping companies, and environmental researchers, is growing its constellation footprints despite the individual operator fluctuations visible in the data.

Commercial satellites represent the overwhelming majority of the satellites launched since 2016. AEI’s research puts that figure at 84 percent of all satellites launched in the third space age. Government satellites, including military, civil science, and navigation missions, make up the remaining 16 percent. That ratio reflects how thoroughly commercial operators have taken over as the primary source of demand in the current era, which has significant implications for frequency spectrum management, orbital slot allocation, and debris mitigation. When most satellites are commercial, the rules governing their end-of-life disposal need to be commercially enforceable, not just technically aspirational.

Whether the satellite industry can sustain this pace without triggering serious orbital congestion is a question the data doesn’t answer clearly. The European Space Agency’s 2025 Space Environment Report found that approximately 40,000 objects are now tracked by space surveillance networks, of which roughly 11,000 are active payloads. The actual number of debris objects larger than one centimeter in diameter, large enough to cause catastrophic satellite damage on impact, is estimated to exceed 1.2 million, with more than 50,000 larger than 10 centimeters. Within certain altitude bands in low Earth orbit, the density of active objects has reached the same order of magnitude as the density of debris objects, a threshold that engineers find genuinely concerning.

The Debris Explorer and a Growing Problem

Spent rocket upper stages are among the most preventable categories of orbital debris. Unlike anti-satellite weapons tests, which are geopolitically motivated acts embedded in military doctrine, or accidental collisions, which by definition aren’t planned, leaving an upper stage in orbit is an operational decision that could be made differently with modest cost. The rocket body is already there. Deorbiting it requires residual propellant and time, but not new technology. The problem isn’t engineering. It’s incentives and regulation.

The Space Data Navigator’s Debris Explorer makes clear how much this matters, and which actor is most responsible. AEI’s research identifies China as depositing rocket bodies in orbit at a higher rate than any other nation. When that observation is paired with the specific debris events the Debris Explorer tracks, the implications become concrete.

In 2022, a discarded Long March 6A upper stage, left in orbit after completing its mission, exploded. Then, in August 2024, a different Long March 6A upper stage, also abandoned in orbit, exploded, generating a cloud of at least 664 pieces of trackable debris. The 2024 event happened at a higher altitude than the 2021 Russian ASAT test that destroyed Cosmos 1408, which attracted far more international attention. That altitude difference has significant long-term consequences. Approximately one percent of the debris from the Russian ASAT test remains in orbit today, because the relatively low altitude allowed atmospheric drag to gradually pull the fragments down. By contrast, about 95 percent of the debris from the 2024 Long March 6A explosion remains in orbit, and about 85 percent of the 2022 explosion’s debris field is still there. Both debris clouds will be a hazard to satellite operators for decades.

This is the strongest argument for treating China’s debris-generating behavior as a global problem rather than purely a US-China bilateral concern. Those debris fields threaten satellite operators from every country operating assets in the same orbital shells, including European and Asian commercial operators, international science missions, and developing-nation Earth observation programs. Framing it as simply a feature of superpower competition understates both the scope of the harm and the breadth of the stakeholders with a legitimate interest in changing the behavior.

Anti-satellite weapons tests are the most politically visible source of debris, but their long-term contributions to the orbital environment depend heavily on altitude. China’s 2007 ASAT test, which destroyed the Fengyun-1C weather satellite in a direct-ascent kinetic kill at relatively high altitude, created a debris field that remains one of the largest in the tracking catalog. The 2009 collision between the operational Iridium 33 communications satellite and the defunct Russian military satellite Cosmos 2251 was accidental, but it more than doubled the number of tracked objects below 1,000 kilometers altitude in the existing catalog. These historical events shape the baseline that the Debris Explorer’s visualizations are built on.

The Kessler Question

The risk framework that most concerns orbital engineers is one described by Donald Kessler and Burton Cour-Palais in a 1978 paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: a cascade of collisions in which each impact generates debris that causes more impacts, until certain orbital regions become effectively unusable for satellite operations. That cascade scenario, now known as the Kessler syndrome, has not been triggered in any orbital shell as of 2025. But the density of objects in some altitude bands has risen to levels that make the margin genuinely narrower than it was a decade ago.

The European Space Agency’s 2025 Space Environment Report stated directly that if current behavior in space continues, “the risk level passes beyond the point of sustainability.” That’s not a fringe assessment. ESA operates satellites in the affected orbital regions and has a direct institutional interest in getting this diagnosis right. The agency is developing a Health Index for the space environment as a clearer public indicator of its evolving state.

Honest accounting here requires acknowledging that nobody knows with precision when, or whether, a Kessler-type cascade might begin in any specific orbital shell. The modeling involves enough uncertainty, stemming from unknowns about the sub-centimeter debris population, the probability of specific collision events, and the future behavior of operators with respect to deorbit compliance, that different researchers reach meaningfully different conclusions about timelines and severity. What the Debris Explorer’s data makes clear is that the inputs feeding the risk model, more objects, more fragmentation events, more rocket bodies left in orbit at altitude, are all moving in the wrong direction.

Debris Mitigation: What Works and What Doesn’t

SpaceX’s operational practice with Falcon 9 second stages illustrates what responsible disposal looks like in the current era. Falcon 9 upper stages are typically deorbited within a few hours of payload separation, reentering and burning up in the atmosphere rather than remaining in orbit as debris. That practice has become an informal industry standard among responsible operators, though it’s far from universally followed.

The Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation licenses US commercial launch providers and can impose deorbit requirements on upper stages as conditions of launch licensing. For operators whose rockets are launched from US territory or use US-manufactured components, this provides a regulatory lever. Extending similar standards internationally is far harder. The UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space has developed voluntary debris mitigation guidelines that most spacefaring nations have nominally endorsed, but voluntary guidelines with no enforcement mechanism have predictable effectiveness against actors for whom orbital debris generation is a consequence of operational decisions that save time and money.

The Artemis Accords, the US-led bilateral agreement framework that has now attracted more than 40 signatories, include general language on debris mitigation and transparency. Harrison’s AEI analysis recommends negotiating a new multilateral agreement that builds on the Artemis Accords but includes more specific and binding commitments. That recommendation faces a clear geopolitical obstacle: the countries most likely to be asked to change their behavior, China and to some extent Russia, are also the countries least likely to join a US-sponsored treaty framework. Whether that makes the recommendation impractical or merely difficult is a judgment call, but the underlying analysis is sound.

Commercial space domain awareness represents the most encouraging counter-trend in the debris picture. Companies offering satellite tracking, conjunction warnings, and collision avoidance services have expanded significantly in recent years. LeoLabs operates a network of ground-based phased-array radars specifically designed to track small debris objects in LEO. ExoAnalytic Solutions maintains an optical telescope network that tracks objects in higher orbits. These commercial tracking services complement the US military’s Space Surveillance Network and make orbital conjunction data more widely available to satellite operators who need it for daily operations. The Space Data Navigator’s broader research context, including Harrison’s analysis, points to this commercial SDA sector as a genuine area of competitive US advantage in the current environment.

In-space servicing technology represents a longer-term potential contribution to debris mitigation, though it remains at early development stages for commercial applications. Satellites that can be refueled, repositioned, or safely deorbited after their operational lives would substantially reduce the number of defunct objects at altitude. Several companies and defense contractors are working on servicing and life-extension technologies, and the US Space Force has expressed interest in space logistics capabilities as part of its broader operational framework.

The Policy Context Behind the Data

The Space Data Navigator is analytical in form but explicitly policy-oriented in purpose. Harrison is clear about this in his published research. The tool’s data serves as the empirical foundation for a set of recommendations about how the United States should approach the current competitive environment in space, and those recommendations reflect a specific reading of where the US advantage is strong, where it’s fragile, and what could erode it.

AEI’s core argument is that the United States enters the third space age with a commanding position, but one that rests primarily on a technology lead that is inherently temporary. Other nations, whether through independent innovation or strategic borrowing, will eventually replicate or counter the specific engineering advantages that currently give SpaceX and the broader US space industrial base their edge. Converting a technology lead into an enduring structural advantage requires building on foundations deeper than any single technical breakthrough: the combination of open capital markets, commercial innovation culture, and regulatory environments that permit rapid iteration.

The three clusters of recommendations in Harrison’s 2024 AEI report follow from this diagnosis. The first cluster addresses reducing obstacles for new launch vehicles and entrants, including expanding the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation to handle higher licensing volumes, increasing Space Force investment in launch range operations and infrastructure, and revising military launch acquisition strategy to create more openings for new providers. The second cluster focuses on pressing the current US military advantage in space before competitors close the gap, including developing larger ISR satellites for the NRO, accelerating PWSA deployment, and beginning to draw on commercial imaging capabilities for operational combatant command support. The third cluster involves using NASA’s international partnership programs, particularly the Artemis program, as diplomatic leverage, expanding partnership opportunities, and pursuing new multilateral frameworks for space governance.

Whether all of these recommendations are the right ones is a separate question from whether the underlying data is correctly interpreted. The Space Data Navigator’s value is that it separates those two questions. Users who agree with the factual trends but disagree with the policy prescriptions can engage with the former without being forced to accept the latter.

Transparency as Method

Opening a government-connected think tank’s analytical database to public access is not the default practice in security-oriented research. Policy institutes that do quantitative national security analysis more often publish conclusions than the underlying data. Harrison’s decision to build the Navigator as a public-facing interactive tool, rather than a proprietary analytical system used only internally, reflects a genuine commitment to transparency that has practical consequences for how the tool’s findings are received.

When the Satellite Explorer shows a sharp jump in US military and intelligence satellite counts in 2023 and 2024, any researcher can interrogate that finding directly by filtering the data, comparing time periods, and checking what programs drive the number. When the Debris Explorer shows a spike following a Chinese rocket body explosion, the event’s specific contribution to the overall debris catalog is visible and traceable. That kind of transparency doesn’t eliminate debate, but it raises the evidentiary standard for it.

The addition of ASK HAL, the AI query assistant, extends this commitment in a different direction. Rather than requiring users to already understand the tool’s interface and data structure, ASK HAL allows someone with no prior familiarity to ask a plain-language question and receive a contextualized visual answer. Harrison has publicly acknowledged the tool isn’t perfect, which is a reasonable description of any AI assistant working with a specific constrained dataset. That candor about the tool’s limits is itself consistent with the broader approach the Navigator takes to its data, documenting what’s known, what’s estimated, and what remains genuinely uncertain.

What the Space Data Navigator Doesn’t Capture

No analytical tool covers everything, and the Space Data Navigator’s About page addresses its limitations directly. Several categories of space activity are inherently resistant to open-source tracking.

Classified military satellite programs present the most obvious challenge. Some US, Chinese, and Russian satellites are not publicly disclosed, which means any comparison of military satellite inventories based on the Space Data Navigator’s data is incomplete by design. Harrison’s analysis attempts to capture what open-source analysts can confirm or reasonably infer, but the figures for classified programs are estimates informed by public reporting and satellite tracking, not confirmed inventories. The NRO constellation is a good example: its existence became known through public reporting and orbital observations, but specific details about its capabilities and full extent remain classified.

The sub-centimeter debris population presents a different kind of uncertainty. Space surveillance networks can track objects larger than roughly 10 centimeters in low Earth orbit, and somewhat larger objects in higher orbits. The much larger population of smaller objects, estimated to number in the millions, is inferred from statistical modeling and sampling rather than direct observation. The Debris Explorer’s visualizations are most reliable as indicators of trends and orders of magnitude rather than as precise real-time inventories.

The definition of “operational” also introduces ambiguity in satellite counts. Satellites can enter degraded states where they’re no longer fully controlled but haven’t been officially decommissioned or deorbited. Different tracking organizations apply different standards for classifying such objects. The Satellite Explorer’s operational counts reflect specific classification choices that are documented in the About page, and users comparing the Navigator’s figures with other sources should expect some variation.

Summary

The AEI Space Data Navigator represents something genuinely uncommon in national security policy research: a public-facing analytical tool that makes its underlying data accessible to anyone who wants to examine it, challenge it, or build on it. The three-module structure, covering launches, satellites, and debris, gives users access to trends that span decades, events that span seconds, and competitive dynamics that span continents.

What the data shows, taken in its entirety, is a third space age defined by concentration and acceleration on the one hand and fragility on the other. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Starlink constellation have fundamentally restructured the global launch and satellite markets in ways that are visible in every time-series chart the Navigator generates. The United States holds a commanding position in operational satellite capacity, effective launch capability, and the military intelligence sector, though not in commercial remote sensing by satellite count. China is a genuine competitor in launch volume and is building commercial constellation ambitions, but has contributed disproportionately to the orbital debris problem through its practice of abandoning spent upper stages at altitude.

That debris problem is the one dimension of the Space Data Navigator’s picture where technological optimism doesn’t straightforwardly apply. The commercial space domain awareness sector is improving orbital transparency, and space debris mitigation technology is advancing. But the rate at which debris is being deposited in long-duration orbits is outpacing the rate at which it’s being removed or prevented. The two Long March 6A explosions, each leaving the majority of their debris fields intact in orbit for decades, are a data point that the Debris Explorer makes unmistakably clear, and that clarity is the Navigator’s most important contribution to public understanding of where the third space age is actually heading.

The tool’s implicit argument, running beneath all of its specific datasets, is that better-informed public debate about space leads to better policy, and that making the underlying numbers accessible is a prerequisite for that debate. That premise is hard to argue with, even for people who reach different conclusions about what the numbers mean.

Appendix: Top 10 Questions Answered in This Article

What is the AEI Space Data Navigator?

The AEI Space Data Navigator is a free, interactive online platform hosted by the American Enterprise Institute that tracks data on orbital launches, satellite populations, and space debris trends. It consists of three core modules, the Launch Explorer, Satellite Explorer, and Debris Explorer, each offering downloadable visualizations and filters for comparing data across countries, time periods, and mission categories. The tool is publicly accessible at spacedata.aei.org and is maintained by AEI senior fellow Todd Harrison.

Who created the Space Data Navigator and what is their background?

The Space Data Navigator was created and is maintained by Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Harrison focuses on defense budgets, space policy, and the geopolitical dimensions of commercial space activity, and the Navigator serves as the empirical foundation for his published research and policy recommendations on US competitive position in space.

How does AEI define the three space ages?

AEI defines the first space age as 1957 to 1990, characterized by Cold War militarization and state-led exploration by the United States and the Soviet Union. The second space age spans 1991 to 2015, marked by market diversification but also stagnation in launch rates and innovation. The third space age began in 2016 and is defined by rapid commercialization and proliferation of satellites, driven largely by SpaceX’s reusable launch systems and the emergence of mega-constellations.

How dominant was SpaceX in the global launch market in 2024?

In 2024, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 conducted 52 percent of all orbital launches globally, launched 84 percent of all satellites sent to orbit, and delivered 84 percent of total satellite mass to orbit. SpaceX completed 134 Falcon family launches during the year, a roughly 40 percent increase over its 2023 cadence, making it by far the most prolific launch provider in history by annual mission count and payload delivered.

What share of operational satellites does SpaceX’s Starlink constellation represent?

As of the end of 2024, SpaceX’s Starlink constellation accounted for approximately 65 percent of all operational satellites in Earth orbit. The United States held nearly three times as many operational satellites as all other countries combined, a disparity driven almost entirely by Starlink, which had approximately 6,895 satellites on orbit and more than 4.6 million customers across 118 countries and markets by the close of 2024.

What is ASK HAL in the Space Data Navigator?

ASK HAL is an AI assistant embedded in the Space Data Navigator’s main landing page that translates plain-language questions into customized charts drawn from the Navigator’s underlying datasets. Users can ask questions like “Which orbit has the most space debris?” or “Compare military satellites for China, Russia, and the US,” and the assistant generates a relevant visualization in real time. Todd Harrison has described it as functional but imperfect.

What caused the two major debris events involving Chinese Long March 6A rockets?

In both 2022 and August 2024, discarded Long March 6A upper stages that had been left in orbit after their missions exploded, generating debris clouds. The 2024 event created at least 664 pieces of trackable debris. Because both events occurred at higher altitudes than recent Russian ASAT tests, approximately 85 percent of the 2022 debris and 95 percent of the 2024 debris remain in orbit today, where they will persist as collision hazards for decades.

Why is China’s practice of leaving rocket bodies in orbit considered a global threat?

China deposits more spent rocket upper stages in orbit after mission completion than any other nation. Those objects are among the largest intact pieces of debris in orbit, and when they fragment catastrophically, as two Long March 6A stages have already done, the resulting debris clouds threaten satellite operators from every country using the same orbital shells, not just US or Chinese operators. This makes the practice a collective risk rather than simply a bilateral competitive issue.

What is the Kessler syndrome and why is it relevant to the Space Data Navigator’s findings?

The Kessler syndrome, first described by NASA scientists Donald Kessler and Burton Cour-Palais in a 1978 paper, refers to a potential cascade of orbital collisions in which debris generates more debris, eventually rendering certain orbits unusable. The European Space Agency’s 2025 Space Environment Report concluded that if current behavior continues, the space environment’s risk level will pass beyond the point of sustainability, and the Space Data Navigator’s debris data shows that the inputs driving this risk are all moving in the wrong direction.

What policy recommendations has AEI made based on Space Data Navigator findings?

AEI’s research recommends expanding the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation to handle higher licensing volumes, increasing Space Force investment in launch range infrastructure, revising military acquisition strategy to support new launch entrants, accelerating deployment of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, pressing the current US advantage in NRO intelligence satellite capabilities, and negotiating a new multilateral agreement on debris mitigation with more specific and binding requirements than the existing Artemis Accords currently provide.