Just the job for refuse collectors with high-flying ambitions

Is that stars before my eyes – or the twinkle of space debris?

Once it was just the nursery rhyme cow jumping over the moon. Now you are more likely to see bits of space brica-brac looping around it instead of some bewildered bovine.

Not content to pollute our own planet, we are now earnestly turning the solar system into an orbiting rubbish skip. If there was a futuristic version of Steptoe and Son, those bickering rag and bone men, played by Harry H Corbett and Wilfred Brambell, would be up there squabbling and scooping up lucrative loads of scrap metal.

Since the pioneer days of the first rocket, Germany’s

V2, getting into space in 1942 and the first satellite, Sputnik jubilantly launched into orbit in 1957, our celestial heavens have become an increasingly cluttered dumping ground.

A desire to find new worlds before we inevitably trash our own has got us where we are today – 7,500 tonnes of hardware drifting aimlessly around the planet.

It is not surprising. Unlike Newton’s apple, in outer space, what goes up doesn’t come down. Once it escapes the gravitational pull of Earth’s atmosphere it stays up.

But, what is scarily surprising, is the vast amount of mechanical flotsam and jetsam that is up there. Some 40,000 objects at the last count. space movies, or follow Dr Who’s Tardis as it spins through time and the cosmos, the worst you will see are green gloopy creatures that kill their enemies with slime, or irritable Daleks that like saying “exterminate!”.

Reality is far more frightening. A space traveller is far more likely to confront a piece of junk that some bugeyed alien from the Final Frontier.

Tiny satellites, called CubeSats, have been used in low Earth orbit for a number of years and are now being employed for interplanetary missions as well.

Inexpensive to build, and with the potential for hundreds be launched at once they are increasingly popular.

Recently India sent more than 100 into orbit. And the experts say 12,000 more could go up within the next few years.

As these satellites eventually die or their mission ends, the amount of junk in space will continue to rapidly increase.

However, there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon. Active Debris Removal, the space cavalry equivalent of local council refuse collectors, is seeking the best way to capture orbiting debris. Experiments with harpoons and nets are being conducted with the aim of dragging items back into Earth’s atmosphere where they will burn up.

It’s a bit like netting rubbish from our oceans.

While Blue Planet has brought our attention to Earth-bound eco-disasters it is perhaps the space beyond we should also be seriously concerned about.

There is a folk rhyme about an old woman carrying a broom “tossed up in a blanket 17 times as high as the moon”.

Asked why she was up so high, she answered: “To sweep the cobwebs down from the sky.”

In a modern version she would carry a magnet to gather up all the bits of junk.

Does anyone have her telephone number?