The largest condominium ever built has no administrator

You decide to buy a flat in a brand-new condominium. Beautiful views, deal of a lifetime — but at closing there is no by-law, no administrator, no assembly that caps how many tenants can live there. Anyone with money can add a floor, throw up an illegal balcony, park a container in the courtyard. Nobody has to clean the stairs; when you move out you can dump furniture in the lobby. In a real city such a building would be seized within a week.

Yet we are building something very similar above our heads. It is called low Earth orbit, and we are moving in at the rate of one satellite every two or three hours.

The residents

In 2019 this building had fewer than two thousand tenants; today there are over 16,000, and a single co-owner — Starlink — holds an enormous share. It is as if in a hundred-unit building one owner bought sixty-six, rented them all, and also decided how many new units to build. Between filings and announced projects, talk runs to over a million future “units”.

In the lobby, uncollected trash includes about 46,000 objects large enough to track, plus over 140 million fragments too small to follow individually but fast enough (28,000 km/h) to pierce a satellite like a bullet. Clearance rules exist only in patches; internationally there is no shared binding regulation.

The noisy neighbour

In 2019 Europe’s Aeolus science satellite had to manoeuvre at the last moment to avoid an early Starlink. ESA warned SpaceX for days; when a reply came, they did not intend to move — an internal technical issue, they later said. Seven years on, between June 2025 and May 2026 alone Starlink satellites executed over 355,000 collision-avoidance manoeuvres: more than forty each, roughly one dodge a week.

Manoeuvres are accelerating faster than the satellite count: in three years half-yearly dodges nearly octupled while the population doubled. Every flat in the building is becoming proportionally more dangerous, not only more crowded.

“Don’t worry, the system holds”

For now disaster is averted by automatic doormen: autonomous manoeuvre systems working round the clock. It works until it doesn’t. A condo whose safety depends on the autopilot never failing, never seeing a simultaneous blackout, never hitting a software bug, is not safe — it is a condo whose unsafety is well masked.

Mean time to a possible collision at 550 km altitude fell from 164 days in 2018 to 2.5 days today: not a countdown, but a signal of how little margin remains when something goes wrong.

What if the building becomes uninhabitable?

If your terrestrial building becomes uninhabitable, you move. If the busiest orbital belts became uninhabitable through a collision cascade — Kessler syndrome, theorised in 1978 — there is no other condo to which to move GPS, weather, military communications, internet for half the planet. That building has no plan B.

Who may decide how many flats can be built in a good that formally belongs to all humanity? Is it acceptable for a single private actor to hold nearly two-thirds of the condo and apply to build another ten times larger while safety rules stay voluntary? Who pays for active debris removal? Are we learning anything from oceans full of plastic and an atmosphere full of CO₂, or repeating the same mistake a little higher up, where for now it is invisible?

The sky above our heads — for all of human history the only truly uncontaminated space — is filling like a condo without rules: fast, without permission, with the quiet certainty that someone else will have to deal with the disaster.