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Woman: I love space technology. But even kids know to clean up their toys when they're done
playing. So why can't space agencies show the same courtesy?
In the past 50 years engineers have had their fun, and in doing so clogged our orbits with
tens of millions of pieces of man-made debris. This amount of space junk could literally
ruin it for everyone.
Thankfully there are great efforts to minimize harm. Most space junk is carefully tracked.
Metal foils defuse the impact of small pieces on spacecraft, and dead equipment is guided
into so called graveyards orbits, dedicated only to junk.
But there is always the risk of a collision in the graveyard orbit causing more debris
to fly off into working orbits where they can damage satellites or worse, manned spacecraft.
At those speeds even a paint chip can be deadly. Or each collision could lead to more and more
collisions, causing the domino effect known as Kessler syndrome. He predicted that an
exponential increase in debris would make space exploration unfeasible for generations.
We do have a few options. A laser broom could be installed on the space station to sweep
debris away, or better yet, satellites can be programmed to burn up in the atmosphere
at the end of their life.
But what you don't want to do is, oh, I don't know, send a ground missile up and blowing
old satellites to smithereens. Yeah. I'm looking at you China. I haven't forgotten 2005. Or
let two satellites collide. Russia and US, nice work. Way to get us one step closer to
Kessler's future fun fest.