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Our relationship with space is changing rapidly.

For almost all of human history, the space above us was an unreachable frontier. Yet in a single human lifetime, Earth’s orbit has gone from largely empty to congested with satellites.

Meanwhile, although the moon remains mostly inaccessible, over the next few decades it is expected to become the big prize to be contested by major world powers – the US, China and Russia. Several countries have ambitious plans to return humans to the moon, and this time to stay there permanently.

This week, the Guardian has launched a series on our shifting relationship with space – from one of exploration to occupation. We have interviewed pioneers seeking to mine valuable resources on the moon, worked with astronomers to track tens of thousands of satellites launched into Earth’s orbit, and assessed the role of a UN agency that has found itself in the middle of a politically charged dash back into space.

It is a time of great excitement for scientists, enthusiasts and business owners. Yet it is also a moment to stop and think about our role in space and our responsibilities.

But first, this week’s most important reads.

Essential reads

In focus

History is full of examples of pioneers who rushed to unknown frontiers, only to realise too late that they had caused irreparable damage to environments they did not fully understand.

We are already seeing environmental concerns linked to the 21st-century space age. One study found that roughly 10% of particles in the stratosphere (which begins at about 10km above the Earth) contain metals that originated from space activities such as rocket launches. The impact is still being studied, but researchers fear it could affect atmospheric chemistry and the ozone layer, which shields the planet from radiation.

A recent UN report highlighted the environmental impacts of space activities, saying there was an “urgent need for sustainable practices to manage potential orbital congestion and environmental impacts to all layers of the atmosphere”.

One of the most arresting ways to see our impact on space is to visualise the tens of thousands of human-made objects spinning around the globe. At the Guardian, we wanted readers to see for themselves how Earth’s orbit is becoming increasingly crowded with communication, weather, internet and navigation satellites.

We decided to tell this story through an immersive, interactive format that we call “scrollytelling”. In this case, the reader scrolls down the story and can view Earth’s orbit being populated over the decades with more and more satellites. It’s quite mesmerising and you can see it here.

Guardian visuals editor Ashley Kirk, who oversaw this project, explains how the main challenge was finding reliable data. “We needed figures on not only the satellites that are up in orbit now, but also the satellites that have previously been launched but have since fallen out of orbit and been destroyed,” he said.

We relied on multiple sources to provide the full picture, and also asked a renowned astronomer, Jonathan McDowell, to cross-check our data sources and compare them against his own.

And it’s a lot of data. More than 14,000 satellites are in orbit. Space debris, often called “space junk”, is also there. That includes discarded rocket stages and the remnants of defunct satellites.

The surge in orbital activity has created a significant collision risk, and there have already been a handful of crashes. In 2007, a Chinese anti-satellite weapon test intentionally blew up a weather satellite, creating a dangerous cloud of space debris. Two years later, a US satellite and a defunct Russian satellite slammed into each other, creating almost 2,000 pieces of shrapnel.

Tens of thousands of tiny fragments of metal are now travelling at high velocities. The big fear is that future collisions will cause a domino effect in which Earth’s orbit becomes a dangerous minefield filled with tiny, high-speed bits of metal.

Frederick O’Brien, a journalist and software developer at the Guardian, created the interactive from a proof of concept to the final piece. It required weeks of work.

As a global society, we rely on satellites constantly, not only to help us navigate around using Google Maps, but also to provide internet access and, critically, predict the weather. Space-based monitoring of the Earth also allows researchers to track deforestation, desertification, glacier and ice-cap melt, and the spread of oil spills.

“This piece reveals a significant problem which, if left unchecked, could disrupt some of humanity’s most important services such as the internet,” says Ashley. “It’s a complex area that really needs to be visualised for you to see just how many individual satellites – all with different heights, speeds and trajectories – are now circling the Earth.”

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