Space junk can make space inaccessible to humans: infographics

On Habré more than once and not two wrote about space debris and the problems associated with it. Now those scientists and engineers who are involved in designing spacecraft have far more problems than, say, 20 years ago.

In addition to the problems in designing the device itself and planning its route with all the braking / acceleration and other maneuvers, now we have to take into account space debris. The collision of the device costing many tens and hundreds of millions of dollars with a small debris is fraught with the loss of the device for science / business.
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Well, such fragments are becoming more and more.

First, NASA employee Donald Kessler, who in 1978 wrote with another co-author the article “Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites: The Creation of a Debris Belt”, drew on the problem. After 13 years, he again drew attention to this problem, writing another article on this topic .

Among other things, the debris multiplies, because when two objects in space collide, they are further divided into more parts, which, when confronted with something else, generate new objects. And so on and so forth. How much space debris is in orbit right now? This is more or less clearly shows infographics:





And here is another visual visualization of the problem , where all the data are displayed as of November 2013.

Well, what to do with all this garbage, while no one knows. Various companies, agencies and individuals are developing clean-up projects for near-Earth space, but no one has yet begun the practical implementation of all this.

PS By the way, while writing the note, I remembered about the story read by somehow NF where the problem of garbage in space was considered (not only in near-Earth space), but in a slightly different way. G. White - “Deadly Rubbish” (many thanks to Sulako for a tip to the author / title). I highly recommend reading.