According to a new report by the European Space Agency (ESA), the growing threat of human-made debris in orbit worsened significantly in 2024. The number of tracked space debris objects rose by approximately 8% last year, reaching around 40,000, with countless smaller fragments still capable of damaging satellites or spacecraft.

The report highlights a particularly alarming incident in August: a Chinese Long March 6A rocket exploded, generating one of the largest clouds of orbital debris in decades. Events like this and lingering pieces of defunct rockets, satellites, and other hardware have created a hazardous environment for satellite operators such as SpaceX’s Starlink and Eutelsat Communications’ OneWeb, which deliver the internet from low-Earth orbit.

“The amount of space debris in orbit continues to rise quickly,” ESA warned, citing “several major fragmentation events” in 2024 that contributed to the accelerating clutter.

With more companies—including Amazon.com Inc., Telesat Corp., and various state-owned Chinese enterprises—racing to build satellite constellations, regulators in Europe and the U.S. have tightened rules. 

One key mandate now requires satellite operators to deorbit unused satellites within five years to reduce long-term collision risks in an increasingly crowded orbital neighbourhood.

The computing power of the Mercury spacecraft compared to a modern iPhone is starkly different, highlighting the vast technological advancements over the past decades.

Mercury Spacecraft (1959-1963):

- The Mercury spacecraft's computing capabilities were minimal. The onboard systems were primarily mechanical and analogue, with minimal digital computation. Most calculations were done on the ground, and communication with the spacecraft was handled through radio telemetry.

- The only real "computer" involved was the ground-based IBM 701 or 7090, which handled data processing and flight simulation.

- The onboard systems mainly relied on simple transistor-based electronics for control and navigation, with computation power measured in just a few thousand instructions per second (KIPS).

Modern iPhone (e.g., iPhone 14 Pro):

- A modern iPhone has a multi-core processor with billions of transistors and can perform up to trillions of operations per second (teraflops). For instance, the A16 Bionic chip can handle up to 15.8 trillion operations per second.

- The iPhone also includes advanced graphics processing units (GPUs), neural engines for AI and machine learning tasks, and substantial amounts of RAM and storage.

Comparison:

The Mercury spacecraft's computing power is dwarfed by that of a modern iPhone, which is millions of times more powerful in terms of computational capability.

- To put it in perspective, the iPhone in your pocket has more computing power than all of NASA's computers combined at the time of the Apollo moon landings, let alone the Mercury missions.

- The iPhone can perform complex computations, support high-resolution graphics, and manage extensive communication and data processing tasks that would have been unimaginable with the technology available during the Mercury program.

In essence, the Mercury spacecraft had the equivalent of almost no digital computing power compared to the highly advanced and capable iPhone of today.