Donald Kessler predicts space junk - Space Bollyinside - BollyInside

Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and all those prospective space tourists (hello, William Shatner) should know that NASA estimates there are half a million pieces of debris the size of a marble or larger (up to one cm), and approximately 100 million pieces of debris about one mm and larger.

Of that, only 27,000 pieces of orbital debris, otherwise known as “space junk”, are being tracked by the US Department of Defense’s global Space Surveillance Network.

First, he said, “it was generally assumed that there were very few objects in orbit that were too small to catalogue, although there was no definition as to what limiting size was in the catalogue.

The paper illustrated that even if this assumption were correct, future collisions between catalogued objects would produce a large amount of small debris fragments.

This small debris population would be more hazardous to other spacecraft than the natural meteoroid environment immediately after the first collision.” Kessler’s 1978 paper predicted that around the year 2000 the population of catalogued debris in orbit around the Earth would become “so dense that catalogued objects would begin breaking up as a result of random collisions with other catalogued objects and become an important source of future debris”