STREET DOGS

The clutter in low-Earth orbit has grown rapidly over the past decade. In January 2007, the Chinese government destroyed an aged weather satellite in a missile test, creating what was estimated to be 2,500 pieces of new debris.

That was followed by the February 2009 collision of a defunct 1,900-pound [860kg] Russian Cosmos satellite with a 1,200-pound [544kg] Iridium Communications satellite 490 miles [788km] above Siberia, generating even more waste.

“Both of those events greatly increased the amount of debris in the near-Earth space environment, thus pushing the threat posed by orbital debris even further towards what was described more than 15 years ago as ‘on the verge of becoming significant’,” the National Research Council wrote in a 2011 report.

Space-junk expansion raises questions about the status and pace of a “collision cascading” effect called the Kessler Syndrome, in which flying junk collides and begets new junk, which collides with more junk again, eventually making lowEarth orbit commercially dubious.

Among debris researchers, a debate exists on whether this has already begun.

“We’re not there yet and I don’t want to raise this warning that the situation is spiralling out of control, because it’s just not,” says LeoLab CE Dan Ceperley, calling the Kessler scenario “kind of a bogeyman off on the horizon”.

“But it is kind of like the Wild West out there. There’s this growing understanding that with more and more satellites going to space, [debris] could become a problem.”

“It’s very easy to get something into orbit, and it’s the dickens to get it out,” says Bill Ailor, a research fellow at Aerospace, which specialises in tracking space debris.