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On October 4th, 1957, the Space Age began.

The Soviet Union launched the very first artificial satellite into space, an object about the

size of a beach ball named Sputnik.

In the six and a half decades since the number of objects we humans have launched into orbit

has skyrocketed.

It's an important year, 2023, to ask this question of how many objects have humans put

into space.

Daniel Wood is a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute

of Technology.

We talked with her at our recent live event at the big annual science conference put

on by Triple AS.

And she says we've now put thousands of objects into orbit today.

And this is just the beginning of a major trend.

And we are expecting to see thousands of objects, maybe tens of thousands.

If everyone is planning to do it, does what they say.

And that's only counting objects that are still in operation.

Daniel says if you include the many dead rockets and satellites plus all the debris created

from their collisions down to the screws and tiny paint flecks, basically if you account

for all of the trash that we have dumped into space, that number is much, much higher.

So the number of things that are hard to track but are there and are also not even operating

or sending any radio signal.

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