NASA has started financing research to come up with some solutions

While the odds are tiny that anyone here on Earth will get hit, the chances that all this orbiting litter will interfere with working satellites or the Burberry ties International Space Station, which dodges pieces of debris with increasing frequency, are getting higher, according to a recent report by the National Research Council. The nonprofit group, which dispenses advice on scientific matters, concluded that the problem of extraterrestrial clutter had reached a point where, if nothing was done, a cascade of collisions would eventually make low-Earth orbit unusable. "NASA is taking it very seriously," Mason Peck, chief technologist for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said. "It is becoming an important issue." There is a straightforward solution to the problem: Dispose of the space junk, especially the large pieces, before they collide and break into smaller ones. And so researchers are stepping in with a variety of creative solutions, including nets that would round up wayward items and drag them into the Earth's atmosphere, where they would harmlessly burn up, and balloons that would similarly direct the debris into the atmosphere. Also on the table: firing lasers from the ground. Not to blow things up, which would only make more of a mess, but to nudge them into safer orbits or into the atmosphere. Just last week, researchers at a top Swiss university, the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, announced that they were designing CleanSpace One, a sort of $11 million vacuum cleaner in the sky, that would be able to navigate close to a satellite and grab it with a big claw, whereupon both will make a fiery death dive. The Swiss have only two satellites in orbit, each smaller than a breadbox, but they are concerned about what to do with them when they stop operating in a few years. "We want to clean up after ourselves," said Anton Ivanov, a scientist at the institute's space center. "That's very Swiss, isn't it?" The Air Force currently tracks 20,000 pieces of orbiting space junk, which includes old rocket parts and dead satellites. For now, the risk is real but manageable. Satellite cheap burberry ties operators can dodge the big debris and armor their satellites to withstand impact with smaller pieces. But eventually, if not cleaned up, low-Earth orbit would become too perilous for people and satellites. "It will be a huge risk for an astronaut to go to space," said John Junkins, a professor of aerospace engineering at Texas A&M University, adding: "No one will insure a space launch." NASA eyes solutions The United States has about 500 pieces of large space junk, Junkins said, and Russia about twice that number. "I'm talking about going after things the size of a Greyhound bus," he said. "Absolutely, this is the heart of the problem." Taking down five or six of the large intact objects each year would be enough to halt the cascade effect, he said. Eliminating 10 a year would quickly reverse the trend. NASA has started financing research to come up with some solutions. Technology is just one hurdle. International politics might be a more serious one. Space junk, even if it is just junk, still belongs to the nation that put it there. So if the United States tried to lasso part of a spent Russian rocket, Russia would most likely protest. Many nations would certainly worry that a ground-based laser capable of pushing satellites around would also be wielded as a weapon. Meanwhile, the space junk problem will not be solved unless everyone launching rockets stops adding to it. Junkins, of Texas A&M, said the United States should not wait for new international agreements, but instead follow the example of the Swiss in cleaning up after itself. "The U.S. alone could reverse the growth cheap burberry belts by tackling the several hundred things that we've put there that are our responsibility," he said. "That gives us the moral and technical high ground."