Preface To Space Junk: Junk In Space!

There are lots of articles online about space junk, which is stuff we humans have sent into space which is now just cluttering up the place. It's not just satellites that no longer work - it includes trash we've left up there, & paint chips that have come off the space shuttle, & hatches blown off space modules. & these pieces of junk orbit the planet at around seventeen thousand miles an hour.

It's such a problem that there are several agencies, like the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies which is tasked to tracking & making sure stuff up there doesn't run into spacecraft or the International Space Station or anything we send up there (like currently functioning satellites). Here's a little animation to give you an idea what it's like up there. They say they're tracking 22,000 objects up there.

It doesn't just stay up there - lots of times the orbits degrade & the space junk returns - & you get news headlines like "Satellite Heading For Earth" & "NASA Satellite Falls On Canada: No One Hurt".

If you didn't want to click the little movie up there, here's a similar image from the European Space Agency: