According to Live Science, as of May 2025, there are about 11,700 satellites operating in orbit around the Earth. The number of satellites around the Earth has more than doubled in the past 5 years and the launch rate has also increased every year.
According to Jonathan McDowell - an astronomer at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astronomical Physics, the biggest contributor to this trend is SpaceX's Starlink network (including about 7,500 satellites in orbit) accounting for more than 60% of the total number of satellites in operation.
Several other satellite networks are being planned, including Amazon's Kuiper Project and China's Thousand Sails. Sending new satellites into space is also easier thanks to the reusable rocket, including SpaceX's Falcon 9. Several other companies are also researching new methods to launch a greater payload, such as the startup SpinLaunch, which launched hundreds of satellites into space at the same time using a giant centrifuge.
It is difficult to estimate how many satellites will be launched in the future because companies are constantly changing their plans, says Aaron Boley, an Atolinean Professor at the University of British Columbia, Canada. "The companies will update plans in the process of developing satellite systems, in which many proposed systems will never be launched," Aaron Boley informed.
According to research by Aaron Boley and his colleagues in 2023, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) - the communications satellite management agency, has received proposals for more than 1 million private satellites from about 300 different networks.
The number of proposed satellites may seem large, but most of them are short-lived private satellites. For example, the Starlink satellite is average to operate for about 5 years, then falls back to Earth and burns up when re-esters. Therefore, even if all the 1 million proposed satellites are launched, they will not rotate around the Earth at the same time.
