Heads Up
Posted on | February 6, 2007
Decades of care-free littering of the spaceways has left a catastrophe waiting to happen in orbit:
Cascade warnings began as early as 1978. Mr. Kessler and his NASA colleague, Burton G. Cour-Palais, wrote in The Journal of Geophysical Research that speeding junk that formed more junk would produce “an exponential increase in the number of objects with time, creating a belt of debris around the Earth.”
During the cold war, Moscow and Washington generally ignored the danger and, from 1968 to 1986, conducted more than 20 tests of antisatellite arms that created clouds of jagged scraps. Often, they did so at low altitudes from which the resulting debris soon plunged earthward. Still, the number of objects grew as more nations launched rockets and satellites into orbit.
In 1995, as the count passed 8,000, the National Academy of Sciences warned in a thick report that some crowded orbits appeared to have already reached the “critical density” needed to sustain a chain reaction.
