Space Debris: Clearing the Final Frontier

Every 90 minutes, thousands of metal fragments race around our planet at 17,500 miles per hour. One collision could end the satellite age.

We have spent six decades launching humanity's future into orbit and leaving the wreckage behind. Today, more than 40,000 tracked objects and an estimated 130 million smaller fragments circle Earth, threatening the GPS we navigate by, the satellites that forecast our weather, the networks that carry our communications, and the orbital infrastructure that ...