Near Orbit • Complete & Quick

To maintain a "near orbit" at LEO altitudes, spacecraft must travel at roughly 7 kilometers per second (about 15,000 mph).

This zone, spanning from 180 to 2,000 km above the surface, is the most crowded part of "near space". It is home to the International Space Station (ISS) and massive satellite constellations intended for global internet access. near orbit

The very attributes that make NEO valuable also render it fragile. Three major threats have emerged: To maintain a "near orbit" at LEO altitudes,

NASA estimates there are over 500,000 pieces of debris between 1–10 cm in NEO, and 100 million particles smaller than 1 cm. Traveling at ~7.8 km/s, a 1 cm fragment carries the kinetic energy of a hand grenade. The 2009 Iridium-Cosmos collision and the 2021 Russian ASAT test each generated tens of thousands of new trackable fragments. In a worst-case cascade (Kessler Syndrome), debris collisions would generate more debris, rendering entire orbital bands unusable for decades. The very attributes that make NEO valuable also