EL SEGUNDO, Calif. - There are thousands of dead satellites in orbit and it’s part of the reason why we have millions of pieces of space debris.

In the next five to 10 years, there could be up to 20,000 new satellites in space to help keep companies and everyday services like GPS, smartphones and the internet, connected. That’s 10 times the amount of satellites we currently have in space.

But, once a satellite or object gets hit by another object in space, it gets broken down into smaller pieces – a risk to other satellites in orbit.

“Space debris is agnostic. It doesn’t care what it hits. It doesn’t care what it threatens and it can’t control its exact path once you’ve made it,” Ted Muelhaupt with the Aerospace Corporation said.

According to Muelhaupt, the amount of debris in space has been growing and with the looming increase of the number of satellites in orbit, his team will be in charge of monitoring new space debris more closely to see where it is headed.

“If it takes thousands of satellites to establish your new business, you’re going to keep that business going. And launch more if they have short lifetimes, so we are looking at a very substantial increase in the number of launches and what goes up comes down,” Muelhaupt said.

Muelhaupt’s team uses a new technology that acts as traffic monitors for any new space debris that’s created by also tracking where satellites are. The goal is to minimize how much debris is created in space by preventing collisions between debris and satellites. But when a satellite is broken apart, Muelhaupt said it’s not an immediate danger to us on Earth.

“It’s a slow motion disaster. It takes place over a long period of time. And so we modeled this to figure out what policies affect the outcome. We’re looking not so much to predict the future as how to head off that future,” Muelhaupt said.

That’s why Muelhaupt and the Aerospace Corporation will use the data to get a better understanding of how much debris new satellites are creating and how we can protect space from becoming filled with debris that can take down satellites we rely on for everyday technology.