Orbit on 21 October 2026: 28 objects left the decay queue overnight, and none of them came down

The decay queue on our statistics page held 64 objects yesterday and holds 36 today. Three objects have reentered in the past seven days, and none was among the 28 that left GCAT. They did not fall out of orbit; they fell out of the window. Every one carries a single orbital element set dated 20 September 2026, and this morning that measurement turned 31 days old, one day past the freshness cut-off the queue applies. The catalog itself has not moved for a fifth day: 33,759 objects on orbit, 19,681 payloads, 14,078 spent stages and debris, 98 decays in 30 days and three in seven, down from eight yesterday as the window slid GCAT.

Twenty-seven of the 28 are Starlinks from the 38000 series, launched together on 20 September into a 245-by-261-kilometre orbit at 70 degrees; the twenty-eighth is the Lijian-1 Y18 fourth stage from the same day, left at 233 by 538 kilometres GCAT. The satellites are listed as active, which is the point: a working Starlink climbs out of an injection orbit within weeks, so their recorded perigees are wrong in the harmless direction. The stage is the one that matters, and we know no more about it than a month ago.

What a month-old orbit hides

GCAT's current file lists 315 objects in low orbit with a perigee below 250 kilometres. The element sets behind that number have a median age of 57 days, and twelve were last measured more than a year ago GCAT. That describes the public record, not the sky: the operational catalog is refreshed far faster, and USSPACECOM puts element sets as "updated at least once per day" against 50,000 arriving daily USSPACECOM. ESA's statistics page of 14 October counts about 47,140 objects in catalogues against a modelled 68,450 larger than 10 centimetres ESA DISCOS. Today's how-it-works piece sets out how to read the timestamp on an orbit. It is the gap we described on 17 October from the other side: then no published orbit at all, today one quietly expired.

Close approach of the day

There is not one, for the thirteenth day. Our screening still carries the CelesTrak SOCRATES Plus file of 8 October 2026; requests from this site's data host have been refused since 9 October CelesTrak SOCRATES Plus. That screening found 7,834 pairs inside one kilometre and 111 inside 100 metres across 174,512 conjunctions — figures describing 8 October and nothing since. The close-approach pages say so on their face, and the empty forward list is not reassurance.

Object of the day: CZ-3B Y100 Stage 3

GCAT carries catalog number 61504, the third stage of a Long March 3B launched on 10 October 2024, as in Earth orbit with no decay date, on an orbit of 82 by 1,565 kilometres. Its element set is dated 28 February 2025, 600 days ago GCAT.

A perigee of 82 kilometres is inside the atmosphere in any practical sense, and an object dipping that low every 101 minutes does not persist for twenty months. Either the stage came down and the record has not caught up, or its orbit is no longer known to the accuracy those numbers imply. Nothing has been published since February 2025, and it sits in the catalog as a tonne-class object with an orbit nobody can check.

ClearOrbit's view

A queue that empties because its entries went stale is worse than one that empties because things came down: it looks identical on the page. Any public statistic about objects near reentry should carry the age of the data behind it, and we will put that age on our own decay queue rather than let a filter do the work silently.

The deeper need is unglamorous: published orbits for objects nobody operates. Working satellites get refreshed because somebody wants them refreshed. A Long March third stage from 2024 and a Lijian-1 fourth stage from last month have no such advocate, and they are exactly what a removal mission would rendezvous with. Element sets for derelicts, at a stated cadence and accuracy, would cost little against a first capture.