India, Sept. 16 -- At a star-gazing party in San Jose, I looked up and spotted a star in the sky . Excited, I pointed it out to a friend, only to get a shrug back. It wasn't a planet; it was a satellite. I spotted another. Satellite again.

Not surprising. A little research back home made me realise that Low Earth Orbit (LEO) has filled up with so many satellites recently that even astronomers are confusing them with asteroids. In just five years, from 2020, there have been 11,951 launches to space, most of them to LEO - the space in the 500-1000 kilometre altitude above Earth. It's this altitude that houses satellites used for remote sensing, weather forecasting, spying, and satellite internet. It's also the altitude best suited for hous...