Nearly 46 years after Sputnik 1 beeped its solitary way through space and into history, more than 9,000 human-made objects encircle the Earth. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these items are junk – dead spacecraft, lens covers, screws, paint chips, even plastic bags of human excrement. Traveling up to 38,000 kilometers per hour, this debris threatens navigation severely enough that the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC), an intergovernmental forum of space-faring nations, recently issued a first draft of guidelines to ensure that the 21st century’s most valuable real estate doesn’t become a cosmic landfill.
