We can probably do a back of the napkin estimate on this. The radius of the earth is 6563 km, and LEO is 2,000 km or less. If we use 2,000 km for LEO and round

We can probably do a back of the napkin estimate on this. The radius of the earth is 6563 km, and LEO is 2,000 km or less. If we use 2,000 km for LEO and round the radius of the earth to 6,500 km, the "radius of LEO" is 8,500km. Surface area is 4 pi r^2... so that's a surface area of about 908 million square kilometers. There's a couple ways we could try to guesstimate the upper limit of satellites. How many satellites per square kilometer? Maybe 1? If so, that means 908 million satellites, which is far more than the 114,000 the Canadian company wants to launch. But if we start seeing many deployments in the millions of satellites... that starts to add up pretty quickly. Given the speed of the satellites, is there a certain amount of distance travelled per second that we need to ensure is kept between them, or significant gaps to leave windows for other launches to pass through safely? LEO velocity is about 25,000km/hr, so about 7km/second. If we want a gap of 1 second between satellites (I am not sure if that's excessive or insufficient, just a ballpark) but assuming the orbits are mostly "aligned" so we can keep 1km distance in one axis and 7km distance in the other axis, we can round that to about 1 satellite per 10 square kilometers, so 90.8 million satellites as an upper bound. On the other hand, maybe clusters of launches can be handled more easily by launch planning software by treating them as a group instead of an individual object to be tracked, and maybe for some reason that makes the process easier. Also, the above estimates are probably wild underestimates, because these are based on the surface area of a spherical shell, disregarding all the shells are different altitudes of the sphere... for example, LEO was taken to be 2,000km, but there are nearly equivalent shells at 1,999km, 1,9998km, etc. Even if we assume 10km between shells for our back of the napkin estimate, if we say anything from 1,500km to 2,000km is basically equivalent, we have 50x more capacity than estimated above. Going in the reverse direction, if we assume that for some unknown reason these estimates are off by 2 orders of magnitude, 100x, after accounting for all the equivalent "shells", we're back at roughly the original capacity estimate of 90-900 million satellites.