Space junk – a disaster waiting to happen

Geo-stationary orbit stuff (the outer ring) is manageable for now, but near-earth orbit is a mess. China’s 2007 anti-satellite test, which used a missile to destroy an old weather satellite, added more than 3,500 pieces of large, trackable debris and many more smaller debris to the debris problem. NASA and the the US Department of Defense have a highly accurate database that they maintain. But the problem isn’t just the discarded chunks of of rocket, flying around at 17,000 mph – it’s the smaller coin-sized bits, which are quite capable of doing serious damage.