Wanted: Hoover Sweeper for Space    
                                                             
    We value satellite phone calls, Internet, Skype and the benefit of GPS satellites, while we litter space with junk that could end the fun.

    Even if we stopped launching satellites now, litter would increase. The 29,000 large bits of junk would become more than 200,000 in two centuries. Of 75,000 tons, only seven percent is operational. 

   The European Space Agency (ESA) estimates there are 166 million items, baseball-size and smaller - all moving at five miles per second. Collisions create more pieces. 

   GPS satellites at 22,000 miles are above most debris fields, but not totally out of harm's way. 

   ESA hopes to launch a robot in 2024, for $400 million, to deal with an eight-ton satellite now tumbling in orbit 480 miles above Earth. It will be extremely challenging.

   There are some 500 similar "dead" objects in orbit. (500 X $400 million?)
Something built to remove junk could also destroy enemy spy satellites, so diplomatic and legal issues arise.

   Leftover fuel and overcharged batteries can make third-stage rockets explode, creating clouds of shrapnel. Of 240 events over the years, 236 were explosions. The other four were collisions.

   In 1986, a European rocket exploded into 498 softball-sized pieces and smaller bits. Ten years later, a fragment of that wreckage damaged a French military satellite.

   In 2007, China's anti-satellite missile test blasted a 1,650-pound weather satellite, creating more than 3,000 trackable pieces of junk. In 2009, a private U.S. satellite collided with an inactive Russian military satellite at a relative speed of 26,000 mph. 

   Can't call 911. Can't call AAA. Can't call Mr. Clean.   

                                            AIR&SPACE, Smithsonian  

      Jimmy