Lens 1 · Long-Term
Orbital Traffic Forecast — "Bangkok Highway Index"
Drag all the way right to see the real, researched worst case: 535× today's launch pace — roughly one million discarded rocket stages in orbit. That's the endpoint we want people to see clearly, before continued growth quietly turns today's manageable traffic into that.
⚠ Past the Bangkok Highway line — more real alerts than a ground team could comfortably act on, every single day.
Clear sky (−6)535× / ~1M rockets (−1.54)
What −2 (“Bangkok Highway”) actually feels like: around 186× today's traffic — roughly 348,000 rocket bodies in orbit — producing about 410 real actionable close calls a year. That's more than one genuine collision-avoidance alert every single day, every day of the year.
Rocket Bodies — the spent upper stages left behind in orbit after a launch. They don't do anything anymore, but they don't go away either — every one is a piece of debris other satellites have to steer around. This number is today's real count (1,869), scaled up by the growth slider.
Actionable / Yr — how many real close calls per year are serious enough that someone would have to actually move a satellite out of the way — not just a routine, ignorable pass. More traffic in orbit means more of these per year.
Aggregate Risk — one number summarizing how dangerous the whole orbital environment is, not any single event. It's on a log scale, so every 1-point drop means 10× safer: −6 is a nearly empty sky, −2 is as congested as a rush-hour highway (hence the project's name). Today sits at about −4.27.
The slider (growth ×) — how much busier low Earth orbit gets compared to today's real launch pace. 1× is today; 3.39× is 2025's actual real-world launch cadence. The slider stops at 535× on purpose — that's the real, researched scenario of roughly one million discarded rocket stages in orbit, and it's the point this dial exists to make visible before it happens, not a hypothetical dialed past the evidence.
Not modeled in this dial
Everything above tracks rocket bodies — spent upper stages — because that's the specific category the underlying research measured. Satellites (the payloads those rockets carry) are a separate, real source of orbital debris that this gauge does not track, and there's no researched growth curve for them the way there is for rocket bodies above.
As a rough, back-of-envelope estimate only — not derived from the EDA data behind the rest of this page — if each launch deploys around 4 satellites, reaching 1 million satellites in orbit would take somewhere on the order of 250,000 launches. Treat that as an order-of-magnitude sanity check, not a plotted or verified figure.