Rocketing Towards the Dreaded Kessler Syndrome

Earth has a space junk problem. The amount of debris from the collisions of rocket parts and defunct satellites is growing, bringing us closer to the Kessler Syndrome, in which launching new spacecraft and satellites is too risky.

There’s enough space junk orbiting Earth to make some scientists concerned.

On 15 October 2020, scientists watched in fear as a 16-foot long inoperative Russian navigation satellite and part of a 25-foot long Chinese rocket whizzed passed each other at 33,000 miles an hour, more than 600 miles above the southern Atlantic Ocean. Had they collided, the debris cloud would’ve been large enough to put every other spacecraft and satellite in low Earth orbit at risk.

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These types of near-miss events happen multiple times a year, but occasionally collisions do occur. Back in 2009, a communications satellite struck a Russian military satellite somewhere above Siberia, resulting in some 18,000 pieces of debris that are still tracked today, including orders of magnitude more that cannot…