Space Is Getting Crowded… With Our Trash

Since the dawn of the space age in 1957, humanity has launched thousands of tons of rockets, spacecraft, and satellites into orbit. For decades, there were no systems to manage these objects at the end of their life cycles. Today, the European Space Agency (ESA) estimates that about 900,000 non-functional objects orbit the Earth.

According to the United Nations, this growing space debris threatens future missions, terrestrial communications, and even global security. Space junk ranges from inactive satellites—the size of a car—to tiny fragments like nuts or flakes of paint.

The real danger lies in their speed: over 28,000 km/h, enough to turn any object into a projectile capable of causing severe damage. Even fragments smaller than 1 cm, traveling at orbital speeds of 7.5 km/s, carry energy equivalent to a military explosive. Most debris between 700–1,000 km above Earth is over 10 cm in size, forming a high-risk zone for collisions.