Orbital Debris Analyst

Orbital debris analysts track space junk, predict close passes between objects in orbit, and help decide whether a satellite needs to move out of the way. There is more to watch every year. The European Space Agency's 2025 Space Environment Report says about 40,000 objects are now tracked, about 11,000 of them working satellites, and estimates over 1.2 million pieces of debris larger than 1 cm. Breakups in 2024 alone added at least 3,000 newly tracked objects.

The routine part of the job is exactly what operators are automating. ESA described the work in 2019: a typical satellite in low orbit gets hundreds of collision alerts a week, and for ESA's own satellites about two per week each need hours of follow-up by an analyst. ESA said it was building a machine-learning system to judge the risk, help decide whether to move, and perhaps send the commands itself. The biggest operator has already gone further. SpaceX's Starlink satellites decide on their own, using onboard AI, when to dodge other objects, Space.com reported in 2024, and they made nearly 50,000 avoidance maneuvers in six months.

People are still needed to set the rules, coordinate between satellite operators, handle unusual cases and build the models, and that work grows as orbits get more crowded. The government has no job category for this role. A 2025 Microsoft Research study of AI chatbot use put the closest fields, astronomers (116th) and aerospace engineers (254th), in the top third of 785 occupations for how much of their work AI can help with.

That fits a 3: automation already handles a real share of routine screening, while growing traffic keeps demand up for people who can judge the hard cases. What would change the score: more operators moving to fully automatic collision avoidance, so screening teams shrink, would push it to 4. Rules that require a human to approve maneuvers would bring it to 2.