Deputy Editor Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow This mishap comes a week after SpaceX reported a near miss with a Chinese satellite. Space-tracking company Leo Labs says whatever happened to Starlink 35956 was likely caused by an “internal energetic source,” not a collision. Its radar network detected “tens of objects” around the satellite after the event. The incident happened at 418km (260 miles), an increasingly crowded area known as low Earth orbit where over 24,000 objects, including satellites and debris, are currently being tracked. By the end of this decade, there could be as many as 70,000 satellites operating in that same region, mostly in the service of space internet constellations like Starlink being launched by private and government organizations in the US, China, and Europe. Such density not only creates issues for astronomers, it also increases the odds of a collision that could, in theory, cascade out of control. Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates. Thomas Ricker