The Orbital Rush

Since Sputnik in 1957, thousands of satellites have reached Earth orbit: navigation systems, weather satellites, telescopes, scientific probes, telecommunication constellations. This visualization animates, year by year, the real accumulation of satellites still in orbit today (active or not), drawn from the catalog maintained by the US Space Force’s space surveillance network.

Each point represents a real satellite, positioned at the moment of its launch rather than on its actual orbit, colored by the launching region: United States, Russia/USSR, China, Europe, or the rest of the world. The swarm stays sparse through the early decades of the space age, then thickens sharply from the two-thousands onward.