How many satellites have fallen back to Earth over the last 12 months, whether they decayed naturally or were brought down deliberately at end of life.
Satellite operators identified by name-prefix matching against the GCAT object name. The same patterns I use for the /constellations directory and the homepage operator count.
231 decays in the window did not match a tracked operator name pattern (663 did). Smaller fleets and government satellites tend to fall outside the pattern set.
State of registration per GCAT (the country or international organisation listed as owner). Not where the satellite was launched from.
Top 8 shown; remaining 87 decays are spread across smaller registrants.
How long a satellite was in orbit before re-entry, computed from GCAT's launch date and decay date. Useful for spotting fleet replenishment cycles versus end-of-life retirements.
Payload satellites that re-entered Earth's atmosphere in the last 365 days. Bundles natural decay, intentional deorbit, and end-of-life passivation, because GCAT does not encode the cause.
Deorbits pair with Launches YTD as the two sides of fleet turnover. A constellation in steady state launches roughly as many satellites as it deorbits; divergence in either direction is the more interesting signal.
See When two metrics disagree on the methodology page for the full reconciliation.
Payload re-entries to Earth’s atmosphere over the trailing 365 days.
Jonathan McDowell’s GCAT (satcat.tsv plus satcat100k.tsv, the continuation file for objects numbered 100,000 and up since July 2026)
Objects classified as payloads (Type starts with P, excluding PD payload-debris fragments) with a decay date in the last 365 days
Rocket bodies, debris fragments, components
Annual count of payload re-entries from 2015 to the current year. Each bar is one calendar year of decays from the same GCAT satcat dataset. Pre-2015 entries are excluded so the chart focuses on the modern (mega-constellation era) cadence, earlier history exists in GCAT but the bars would be small enough to read as noise next to recent years.
Three cuts over the trailing 365 days: by operator (name-prefix matching against the GCAT object name, same patterns as the homepage operators chart), by country (state of registration per GCAT, ISO-3166-like codes mapped to readable names for the most common entries), and by age at decay (binned: <1 year, 1–3, 3–5, 5–10, 10+). Age at decay is the GCAT decay date minus the launch date. GCAT preserves original state of registration; pre-1991 USSR satellites are not reassigned to Russia even if they decay decades later; that line in the country breakdown is Cold War orbital leftovers being cleaned up by atmospheric drag.
I don’t distinguish intentional deorbit from natural decay; GCAT doesn’t encode cause, so the number bundles both. Operator coverage is limited to the named-pattern set; smaller fleets and most government satellites fall through and show only in the country breakdown. Age at decay excludes any decay whose launch date is missing or unparseable in GCAT (rare in modern entries, more common in pre-1960s history).
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