>>6324731>How many satellites / spacecraft are there?>(There will be so many satellites, false positive leading to unintended war narrative is ridiculous etc...)>"if a war happens, it is because the actors involved wanted a war..."This was actually a really interesting perspective, I had not thought of it like this before! And there is another angle because typically to build a Jus ad Bellum case for war, you need to create an atrocity / spectacle of revulsion national outrage indignation eg a 9/11 or Gulf Of Tonkin or Pearl Harbour etc with associated "audience costs" compelling retaliation, no population can be convinced to hype mass mobilisation war against invisible unknown orbiting space objects the size of some fridges etc. or even the cubesats YOU VIOLATED MY GEOSTRATEGIC NUCLEAR RUBIKS CUBE lol hehe, but lets see what we can do
On satellites, the ESA has some statistics, updated as of 2025 Oct 21
https://sdup.esoc.esa.int/discosweb/statistics/12,900 satellites functioning out of 23,770 in Earth Orbit and 7070 space launches since 1957. They estimate 54000 >10cm pieces of space debris, 1.2m in the range 1cm to 10cm, 140m in the range 1mm to 1cm
Satellites launched per year about 3000 (and increasing) yes, most of this is Elon Musk SpaceX Starlink.
Given that increasingly, satellites are being launched as miniaturised cubesats or even tiny pico and femtosatellites (mass < 0.1kg) it perhaps makes more sense to track total upmass. The ESA gives the upmass of all tracked space objects in Earth orbit as 15100t, for reference one US guided missile destroyer is about 9,700t and an aircraft carrier is about 100,000t
