IoT is running out of space

A scrubbed rocket launch gives a grim glimpse at the future of satellite networks.

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IoT For All
February 06, 2025

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Earlier this week, Rocket Lab was scheduled to ferry 25 nanosatellites produced by French IoT company Kinéis into low Earth orbit. The planned launch from New Zealand was scrubbed on short notice. The problem? Too much space stuff in the way. And it’s an issue that will only intensify as satellite IoT continues to take off.

On social media, Rocket Lab explained the problem as an unfavorable “COLA” report, elaborating this way:

Space is big, but the space around our planet is not only limited; it’s increasingly crowded. And we’ve known this could be a problem for a while.

The term “Kessler syndrome” was coined by NASA scientists way back in 1978 to describe a nightmare scenario where space debris in low Earth orbit reaches a tipping point and cascading collisions just keep creating more and more high-speed trash.

We haven’t gotten there yet, but the crashes are happening. In 2009, a smash involving an active U.S. satellite and defunct Russian one turned two orbiting objects into 2,200. And there have been plenty of near misses.

“Even if we never launched another satellite, there would still be collisions going on and spontaneous breakups of objects already out there,” said National Space Society researcher Al Anzaldua in 2019.

But we are launching them. Rapidly. SpaceX set a goal of 40,000 nodes for its Starlink network, which would increase the number of satellites ever launched five times over. All on its own.

What does this mean for IoT? For one, it means that deploying new satellite networks will only get harder as the market matures. First-movers may have already secured a nearly insurmountable advantage. Rocket Lab’s own CEO was raising this issue back in 2020, describing the lay of the land as “a race to orbit, [with] zero consideration for what environment we’ll leave behind.”

Worse yet, it means that the always-on, always-accessible network that satellite connectivity solutions promise comes with an ever-growing caveat: a debris cascade could cause a severe, long-term outage without warning. At any time.

So if your head’s in the stars, keep your feet on the ground. There’s a ceiling to how much stuff we can fit in the sky.

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