We live once. Why do we leave so many tell-tale signs? - Part I: Space Junk
There are some things that boggle the mind if we think about them. We humans reached space. Not only to discover the Universe's vastness but also to tap the cosmos for our own ends. We ended up doing all these, and left not only Neil Armstrong's footprint on the Moon, but also tonnes of debris (jettisoned spacecraft parts, nuts and bolts, solar cells, abandoned satellites, paint chips, nuclear reactor cores, spent rocket stages, solid fuel fragments to name a few). Each of some 70,000 objects, ranging from tennis-ball-sized items to whole spent satellites and rockets, can cause immense harm to other spacecraft or on Earth, after reentry . If you had wanted to find out the future trends in the space debris scenario, you will read typically obfuscating predictions. The verbose rhetoric sounds as though the space junk somehow happened to happen - try reading this passage quoted verbatim - "Because of the increased number of larger objects, lack of sufficient debris mitigati...