Did you know there is about 15,000 objects that orbit our planet right now? There is so much crap flying around up there that space missions are getting more and more difficult to navigate through and around all the objects. In the May Issue of Wired Magazine, they mention that these pieces of debris, everything from paint chips to 10-ton rocket stages, are flying around faster than the speed of a bullet.

The article from Wired also warns that if we don’t do anything about this, we will have too many objects to manage making space flight too dangerous. National Geographic mentions that “these objects travel at speeds over 22,000 miles an hour (35,000 kilometers an hour). At such high velocity, even small junk can rip holes in a spacecraft or disable a satellite by causing electrical shorts that result from clouds of superheated gas.”

The article adds that even if we don’t add anything new up there, the debris will keep increasing. The reason for this is the high speed collisions between the debris that is already existing. When these objects collide they break apart creating more debris. What is there to do about it? Well, some experts have suggested everything from laser beams to aerogel to massive nets. Unfortunately, all are not up to snuff yet. This is what National Geographic had to say about it:

Previous proposals have ranged from sending up spacecraft to grab junk and bring it down to using lasers to slow an object’s orbit to cause it to fall back to Earth more quickly.

Given current technology, those proposals appear neither technically feasible nor economically viable, Johnson admits.

But, he says, the space-junk problem needs more attention.

“It’s like any environmental problem,” he said. “It’s growing. If you don’t tackle it now, it will only become worse, and the remedies in the future are going to be even more costly than if you tackle it today.”

Sounds like we need to add another item onto the already long list of environmental concerns. What do you think? Should we worry ourselves with such things, or try to fix what we have going on terrestrially first? Many say just stop adding to it, worry about it later. My concern is what happens once many of the objects lose speed and fall into our gravitational pull? Do we need to start wearing hard hats fitted for falling space debris?

Below is an actual computer illustration from the software that handles the massive tracking responsibility for all 15,000 pieces of debris (Earth is inside the white clump in the middle). This may help put the problem into perspective.