The Space Garbage Problem – How We’re Turning Orbit into a Junkyard
Space isn’t empty anymore—and what we’ve left up there could shape the future of satellites, exploration, and everyday life on Earth.
Orbiting at 17,500 miles per hour, dead satellites, rocket bodies, and millions of invisible fragments form an unseen minefield above our heads. A piece of debris no bigger than a paint chip can strike with the force of a bullet, and one collision can trigger thousands more in a runaway chain reaction known as the Kessler Syndrome.
In this episode, we explore how decades of launches, Cold War shortcuts, and exploding leftovers turned low Earth orbit into one of the most crowded environments humans have ever created. We’ll break down what space junk is, how it got there, why it’s getting worse, and why it matters to everything from GPS and weather forecasts to banking and disaster warnings.
There’s no cleanup crew in space—and almost everything we’ve ever launched is still circling Earth. The question now isn’t if orbital junk is a problem, but whether we can stop turning the space around our planet into a permanent junkyard before it closes off the skies we depend on.
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