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It's not mentioned in the linked article but a significant proportion of the space junk in orbit can be traced to China using a missile to destroy a satellite b

• mturmon 15y ago
  Here's another link to that event, that also discusses a collision between two satellites: http://www.space.com/8334-junk-space.html http://www.space.com/8334-junk-space.html The claim is that the China missile test and this collision are responsible for 60% of the number of objects in orbit. Even though space is vast, the number of useful orbits is limited. For example, the A-train (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-train_(satellite_constellation) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-train_(satellite_constellatio... ) is a parade of remote sensing satellites in sun-synchronous orbits (as they look down, it is always within a few minutes of noon). So this makes inadvertent collisions more likely. Slightly related, here's a close asteroid passby that happened last summer: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news172.html http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news172.html
  • mattw 15y ago
    Slight nitpick - the article said that the collision and missile test increased the amount of debris by 60%, not that they were responsible for 60% of debris in orbit. Still a lot, but not more than half.
    • mturmon 15y ago
      I said "claims" because, for reasons too tedious to list, I don't think they do know or can know a very exact percentage (even to +/- 10%). And note, they're talking about "number of items" (not "amount of debris" as you say -- that would imply mass, a different thing). But if it's anywhere near half of the "number of items", then these two crashes alone are a highly significant source of junk. I did not know that, and that seemed worth a link.
• Tichy 15y ago
  Sounds as if space war is getting too expensive, there is a cheap way to make it infeasible.