Some scientists at the agency are advocating that humans start cleaning up orbital space by 2020-if we remove five to 10 pieces of junk per year, they say, then orbital debris will remain at manageable levels for centuries. Right now NASA is exploring different strategies for cleaning up both large and small junk. "But if you clean up a Coke can from your yard, you are setting an example, and maybe your neighbors will keep their yards clean too." "We are not going to change the problem of orbital debris by picking up one piece of debris," says Volker Gass, who helped to design the new CleanSpace One device. The Swiss Space Center at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), for example, recently announced that within the next five years it plans to launch a janitor satellite into space to grab an aging satellite and pull it to a fiery death in the Earth's atmosphere. But some scientists are beginning to think seriously about what it would take. No nation yet has a concrete plan for an orbital cleanup. "Right now, we have enough time to deal with this problem, but we need to start removing those big objects so they can't create more little pieces." "We've got to stop that from happening, or it could become so unsafe in low Earth orbit that we wouldn't be able to go up there anymore," says Jerome Pearson, president of Star Technology and Research, which is developing its own methods of cleaning up space junk. And as more collisions create more pieces of garbage, the problem grows exponentially. Traveling at 17,500 miles per hour, even a paint chip can blow a hole through a spacecraft. satellite Iridium-33 in 2009, the explosion created at least 1000 new pieces of space junk. When an abandoned Russian spacecraft hit the U.S. Now and then-once every five years on average-hunks of junk smash into each other. Now about 22,000 large pieces of trash circle the globe at thousands of miles per hour, posing a serious threat to functioning satellites and spacecraft and occasionally sending the astronaut inhabitants of the International Space Station running for cover.
Since humans began launching things out of the stratosphere 60 years ago, we've littered the area around our planet with spent rockets and nonworking satellites.