Orbit on 6 October 2026: five days with nothing booked down, and the week's reentry count fell to three

What changed

The seven-day reentry count fell from seven to three overnight, and the newest decay on the books is still 1 October, a fifth straight day with nothing written into the exit column GCAT. The catalog itself did not move for the second day running: 33,670 objects on orbit, made up of 19,595 payloads, 2,113 spent rocket bodies, 11,962 catalogued fragments and 1,325 mission-related components, with the catalogued-ever total holding at 70,235 and the decayed column at 37,407 GCAT.

Both rolling windows are draining rather than filling. The thirty-day reentry count slipped from 85 to 83 and the thirty-day launch count from 224 to 220, in each case because late-September entries aged out behind them rather than because anything arrived at the front GCAT. Across sixty days the count stands at 184 reentries, 46 of them Starlink GCAT. Conjunction figures are stale this morning and are not quoted here.

What has not paused is the falling. Ninety-four catalogued objects sit below a 250-kilometre perigee, where the remaining air takes kilometres off an orbit every day, and the lowest is down to 133 GCAT. None of it reaches the table until a person writes a decay down. The ledger paused this week; the physics did not.

The standing picture

The distribution underneath barely moves. The 400 to 500 kilometre band holds 10,235 objects, of which 10,055 are working payloads and only 180 are debris; the 800 to 900 kilometre band holds 2,764, of which 2,499 are debris and 265 are payloads, with another 2,246 fragments in the 700 to 800 band GCAT. Starlink alone accounts for 11,152 objects at a mean altitude of 457 kilometres, 1,293 of them already below 400 GCAT.

The first band empties itself within years of anything being switched off. The second does not empty on any timescale a government plans against, which is why the mass of the problem is parked there and why The Orbital Clock matters more than the daily count.

Object of the day: a fragment of the rocket that launched Feng Yun 1B

Catalog number 20861, listed as debris from the third stage of the CZ-4 Y2 launch vehicle, is at 201 by 222 kilometres on an element set dated 30 September, the oldest of the fifteen lowest objects in the catalog GCAT. That launch put the Chinese weather satellite Feng Yun 1B into a sun-synchronous orbit near 900 kilometres on 3 September 1990; the satellite stopped working the following August WMO OSCAR.

Thirty-six years later the fragment has weeks left rather than decades. That is the honest price of passive clean-up from the altitudes where debris collects: the atmosphere will do the job, and it charges most of a working lifetime for it. ESA's modelled population counts more than 660 break-ups, explosions and collisions since 1957, more than 17,000 tonnes of material in orbit and roughly 1.5 million objects between 1 and 10 centimetres across, almost none tracked ESA DISCOS. Every one of those events started a clock like this one, and passivating a stage is how you avoid starting another.

ClearOrbit's view

Five days with no recorded reentry is not a quiet orbit, it is a quiet catalog. The objects that were coming down on 1 October still are; the bookkeeping has not caught them.

The useful reading of a week like this is in the low queue rather than the exit column. Ninety-four objects below 250 kilometres will clear themselves without anyone spending a cent. None of that helps the 2,499 fragments at 800 to 900 kilometres, where the same physics runs centuries slow.

Deliberately taking a derelict out of a congested shell remains Proposed; nothing is Flown. Until that changes, the only exit is the one the air provides, and the air is slowest exactly where the problem is worst. We think the first removal belongs there, in the bands the atmosphere has effectively given up on, not in the ones already emptying themselves.