Satellite launches per year worldwide

As more satellites have been launched worldwide, more American cyclists have been killed, a correlation that connects low Earth orbit to ground-level road danger with the kind of statistical confidence that makes you feel simultaneously small and unsafe. The coefficient is 0.856 across eighteen years, during which both the sky and the bike lane got more crowded, and the chart connecting them achieved the existential tone of a graph that has seen too much.

Satellite launches grew from about 60 per year to over 2,500 between 2005 and 2022, driven primarily by mega-constellations. Cycling fatalities grew from about 780 to over 1,000. Both are growth metrics in a technology-driven economy: more satellites because the internet demands bandwidth, more cycling deaths because cities demand alternative transportation without building for it. The indirect connection through the smartphone—which uses satellite-enabled GPS and also distracts drivers—exists but is too diffuse to constitute actual causation. The real shared variable is the same decade of rapid growth in a global economy that invested heavily in some infrastructure (orbital) and underinvested in other infrastructure (terrestrial).

Eighteen years of satellites and cycling deaths is a correlation between two growth curves in the same technological era, one soaring above the atmosphere and the other struggling at street level. The satellites enable the internet, the internet enables the apps, the apps distract the drivers, and the cyclists absorb the consequences. The chain is long, the connection is weak, and the bike lane remains unpainted.