Editor’s note: What If? is an NK News series featuring scenarios about North Korea’s future. Articles in this series draw on verified facts and rigorous analysis to explore hypothetical events in the years and decades ahead.

An explosion of public and private space launches has driven the number of satellites orbiting the Earth to an otherworldly 50,000, a tenfold increase from just a decade before in 2022. The real game-changer, however, is not just the sheer quantity of satellites but the way their powers combine.

A few years before, researchers developed software tools to manage the planetary datasets that these