This piece of space junk landed in a Central California orchard in October. Air Force officials identified it as a fuel tank from a 1990s-era satellite.

(Kings County Sheriff's Office)

At a Glance

Several companies plan to launch broadband internet satellites in the coming years.If those satellites fail or become inactive, they could end up as dangerous space debris.The U.S. is already tracking more than 20,000 pieces of space debris, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

A wave of new satellites being launched into orbit aims to bring internet to even the most far-flung ends of the planet. But experts warn those satellites – thousands of them – could one day wind up as space junk that threaten other objects in space.

“This is something we need to to,” Glenn Peterson, a senior engineering specialist at the Aerospace Corporation who wrote a paper on the subject last year, told Scientific American. “We have to be proactive.”

SpaceX is scheduled to launch into orbit Wednesday night as a test of its Starlink broadband network, which will connect internet signals between satellites and beam them around the world, rather than going through a ground station. The company plans to eventually launch as many as 12,000 small satellites to round out the network. Several other companies plan to launch similar networks, but the SpaceX venture is the largest, and also the one most likely to be completed since the company can fire the satellites into space on its own rockets.

Federal Communications Commission chair Jessica Rosenworcel has warned that new rules are needed for handling space junk and potential collisions.

"If we want to prevent problems in our skies with all this new space activity, we are going to need new policies for ," Rosenworcel tweeted last week.

Many of the new satellites will be launched into low-Earth orbit, which poses less risk because, if those objects die or become inactive, they'll be burned up in the Earth's atmosphere within a few years. But those at higher orbit could hurtle through space for centuries as wayward, uncontrollable chunks of dangerous debris, Scientific American reported.

Surveillance networks are currently tracking of space junk larger than 4 inches, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The U.S. only tracks objects larger than a softball because, NASA says, they would cause the "catastrophic" break-up of any object with which they collide.

In all, there are nearly 129 million pieces of debris orbiting the Earth, a majority of them no larger than a flake of paint.

There are nearly 2,000 active satellites orbiting Earth now, according to the ESA, along with about 3,000 that are dead. Active satellites, including the International Space Station, typically are moved whenever debris or an inactive spacecraft gets too close.

These close encounters already occur thousands of times each year, but estimates say the new launch of mega satellite groups like Starlink could result in an estimated 67,000 annual collision-avoidance maneuvers, according to a report in Technology Review.

“At the moment, there are no that can be enforced properly, in all the countries and for all the companies,” Payam Banazadeh, CEO of a satellite operator called Capella, told the Review. “There is a lot of self-regulation, and self-regulation in space is really, really dangerous.”