How many satellites are in orbit right now?
16,372 active satellites, counted from element sets published in the last few days.
Catalog as of 2026-08-15 12:30 UTC · page generated 2026-08-22
The catalog has not refreshed in over 48 hours, so this figure is older than it should be.
The breakdown
Active satellites
- LEO11,735
- SSO3,618
- GEO588
- VLEO199
- MEO185
- HEO46
- UNKNOWN1
What this number is not
- It counts active payloads, not everything in orbit. Spent rocket bodies and debris outnumber working satellites and are not in this catalog.
- It is not the same as "satellites that work". A satellite can be tracked, and therefore counted, long after it stops doing anything useful.
- Roughly two thirds of it is Starlink, so the total moves mostly with one company’s launch schedule.
How it is computed, and how it is checked
Objects classified as payloads that have a current orbital element set and no decay date. Recomputed from the catalog every six hours, in step with the element refresh.
Counted twice by two different routes over the same predicate: Postgres counts the matching rows, and every one of those rows is then read in and counted here. The two are different queries against different machinery, so a truncated or capped read shows up as a disagreement. Note that this catches a read that lost rows, not a predicate that was wrong to begin with, because both sides apply the same predicate.
Cross-check today: 16,372 · deviation 0.000% · agreed
Where the underlying data comes from is on the methodology page, field by field on sources.
Cite this
OrbitalWiki (2026). How many satellites are in orbit right now? Retrieved 2026-08-22 from https://www.orbitalwiki.com/statistics/how-many-satellites-are-in-orbitThe retrieval date matters: this number changes every six hours.