The Threat to Space Travel That No One's Talking About
If we don't clean up space debris, it could become impossible to leave Earth's atmosphere. Luckily, scientists have a plan. Well, lots of plans. NASA's Plan To Use A Giant Magnet To Make...
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We first covered space junk way back in December 2012, things have changed around here, but in space? They’ve only gotten worse. There are more than half-a-million pieces of pieces of space junk floating around above you, totalling over 7,500 tons [6.8M kg] of stuff. It’s not just spent rocket stages, or dead satellites. There are bolts, flecks of paint, bits of shrapnel… and no matter the size, they’re all going thousands of meters per second waiting to collide with something important! Size doesn’t really matter. There are more than 20,000 pieces of space debris larger than a softball, but so many, about 500,000, are just marble-or-larger-sized pieces. If any of these hit a spacecraft, they could cause some serious damage. So, we have to clean it...
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We first covered space junk way back in December 2012, things have changed around here, but in space? They’ve only gotten worse. There are more than half-a-million pieces of pieces of space junk floating around above you, totalling over 7,500 tons [6.8M kg] of stuff. It’s not just spent rocket stages, or dead satellites. There are bolts, flecks of paint, bits of shrapnel… and no matter the size, they’re all going thousands of meters per second waiting to collide with something important! Size doesn’t really matter. There are more than 20,000 pieces of space debris larger than a softball, but so many, about 500,000, are just marble-or-larger-sized pieces. If any of these hit a spacecraft, they could cause some serious damage. So, we have to clean it...
