Legal Insurrection by Leslie Eastman 6/28/2026
Meanwhile, China’s top-secret ‘dragon’ space plane just released another unidentified object over Earth.China is leaving a growing trail of spent rocket stages in low Earth orbit, and the pace is picking up.
A new report warns this practice is increasing the risk of collisions for both military and commercial satellites operating in an already crowded region of space.
The analysis from space monitoring firm LeoLabs, provided to Breaking Defense, found that from January 2021 to January 2025 China has abandoned 51 spent rocket bodies in LEO above 650 kilometers (about 404 miles) in altitude, more than doubling the number for the previous five years to bring the total to 96.
During that period, Beijing accounted for 86 percent of the global number of rocket bodies left in LEO, nearly seven times more than the rest of the world combined, it adds. By contrast, the US left four, and Russia, only one.
Even more importantly for calculations of potential debris creation, the analysis shows that the “amount of R/B mass abandoned above 650 km from China has more than tripled,” rising from 98,000 kilograms to 305,000 kilograms. This accounts for “98 [percent] of the global increase in abandoned R/B mass is from China meaning China has left over 40x the amount of abandoned R/B mass in long-lived orbits in LEO than rest of the world combined.”
Darren McKnight, author of the LeoLabs study, said a major reason for the large jump in mass is because China uses bigger rockets than most other nations for launching its LEO satellites. The more massive a space object, the more debris it will create if it breaks up of its own accord or it smashes into another space object.
More:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2026/06/chinas-spent-rockets-are-turning-low-earth-orbit-into-a-debris-minefield/
