Earth’s inner orbit is overcrowded with satellites and tens of millions of bits of debris that circle the globe at dizzying speeds. Only a fraction of that stuff is tracked in real time. With the emergence of private space travel, this traffic jam threatens not only the technology we rely on every day, but the lives of astronauts and, now, tourists. On this inaugural episode of The Thread, VQR colleagues Alex Brock and Paul Reyes explore the growing problem of — and the evolving approaches to — space junk.

Read the original article here: http://www.vqronline.org/2020/03/mapping-space-junk.