Space Trash on Our Way to the Stars

Humanity is trashing the space near Earth. Here are some numbers. In October 1957, <a href="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1953-1960/sputnik" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Sputnik-1</a> was launched as the first artificial satellite of Earth. By now, sixty six years later, the European Space Agency <a href="https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Space_Debris/Space_debris_by_the_numbers" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">reports</a> that there <a href="https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Space_Debris/Space_debris_by_the_numbers" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">were</a> 6,500 successful rocket launches of nearly 17,000 satellites into Earth orbit. Out of these, about 11,500 satellites are still in space and about 9,000 of them are functioning. But there are many more objects orbiting Earth as a result of broken satellites or discarded rockets. Altogether, there were more than 640 break-ups, explosions, collisions, or anomalous events that resulted in fragmentation. The number of debris objects regularly tracked by Space Surveillance Networks is 35,150. The total mass of all space objects in Earth orbit is more than 11,500 tons. <a href="https://avi-loeb.medium.com/space-trash-on-our-way-to-the-stars-c494ef84b5d6">Read More</a>