U.S. Taking Initial Steps to Grapple with Space Debris Problem

The space shuttle era is finished, its vehicles museum-bound. The deep-space forays of Apollo astronauts are long gone, their final moon voyage nearly 40 years in the past. And still, space today is more crowded than ever.

Since the space age began, the orbital realm has become increasingly littered with the detritus of skyward human striving—spent rocket boosters, dead satellites, stray pieces of hardware. And in the past decade that debris has piled up with such speed that it has become an inescapable threat to the space-faring endeavors that spawned it in the first place.

Millions of pieces of debris five millimeters and up circle Earth in a high-velocity swarm, each packing enough kinetic energy to disable a satellite. But far more sobering is the threat to human life. In June the six astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) were alerted to take shelter in escape capsules when a piece of debris came within a few hundred meters of the station. In at least five other instances in the past few years when close debris passages have been predicted well in advance, the station has moved out of harm's way.