What NASA already calls the world's 'largest garbage dump' is about to get a lot bigger thanks to the commercial space industry, reports prosaaquino
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images Earlier this year, a five-millimeter hole was discovered in a robotic arm of the International Space Station. It was thought to have been caused by something no larger than a fleck of paint traveling through space ten times faster than the speed of a bullet. Larger pieces of debris can lead to mashups that spray out a shell of debris around our tiny planet. In 2009, a defunct Russian spacecraft slammed into a U.S.
Leading the way is SpaceX, which has launched nearly 1,600 of its 4,000 low-orbit Starlink satellites into space to provide low-cost internet to remote locations on terra firma. Close encounters between the mounting numbers of satellites, debris, and other spacecraft occur thousands of times each year, and they could lead to a nightmare scenario that has been foretold since the late-1970s. Dubbed the Kessler Syndrome, it describes how, as the density of space rubbish increases, debris-generating collisions create a self-sustaining cycle.
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