Never content to pollute only the Earth’s surface, oceans, and atmosphere, billionaire tech moguls like Elon Musk are increasingly flooding our planet’s orbit with debris from their for-profit space ventures.
SpaceX, for example, already has some 8,600 active Starlink satellites doing laps around the planet, a number that needs constant reinforcements as craft either tumble back down to Earth or join the 25,000 bits of identifiable junk already floating in orbit. Just this week, Musk’s SpaceX launched 21 relay satellites into low Earth orbit on behalf of the US Space Force, after sending another 28 Starlink craft to join his ever-growing constellation.
Though there are 25,000 tracked pieces of garbage floating through our skies, researchers estimate there may be as many as 170 million bits of smaller debris too small to track, but with the same capacity to wipe out critical infrastructure. In that increasingly crowded field, mid-space collisions are becoming more and more likely; as of late 2024, Business Insider reported that space-traffic controllers were issuing 1,000 collision warnings per day.
Now, one enterprising startup has developed a way to keep satellites and astronauts safe from all that garbage — at least until someone can clean it up.
It’s called “space armor,” a material made using a composite-to-resin method by the American aerospace manufacturing company, Atomic-6.
In a factsheet, Atomic-6 describes space armor is described as a series of lightweight tiles which protect craft and astronauts against “all untrackable debris” under 3mm in size, and 90 percent of the debris currently in low earth orbit.
“Satellites and astronauts are constantly threatened by millions of untrackable, hypervelocity particles in orbit,” the company told Space.com. “Like a loose pebble hitting your windshield on the highway, orbital debris can strike at any time to do significant damage to spacecraft.”
Though that was the only time the company brought up astronauts, Atomic-6 claims that space armor fixes a problem with traditional satellite shielding, which can break off into “secondary” rubble. While older-style space shields can absorb hits and protect craft in the short-term, they end up adding to the pile of junk zipping around our atmosphere, making them a poor long-term solution.
“It has taken around 18 months to take Space Armor tiles from an idea to a final product,” Atomic-6 CEO Trevor Smith told Space.com, noting that the tiles have withstood significant projectile testing on the ground. “We offer Space Armor in simple hex tiles, but we can technically make Space Armor into most any shape you want.”
In addition to dangerous debris, Atomic-6 claims its space armor is a solution to the “growing threat” of “adversarial spacecraft,” a reference to Russian and Chinese space programs. (To date, no kinetic attack on a rival spacecraft has ever been recorded, though spacefaring countries have scuttled their own satellites.)
Smith said satellites equipped with space armor will begin launching into orbit as soon as 2026, ready to defend craft from Musk’s increasingly toxic presence in space. Whether we’ll ever start seeing astronauts decked out in sheets of space armor? Only time will tell.
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