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NASA: Top 10 Space Junk Missions (networkworld.com)
coondoggie writes: NASA' s Orbital Debris Program Office said that by far the source of the greatest amount of orbital debris remains the Fengyun-1C spacecraft, which was the target of a People's Republic of China anti-satellite test in January 2007. Much more debris is now floating around Earth's atmosphere since the six years NASA last looked at the top 10 space junk missions. The space agency says that 10 missions out of the 5,160 space missions that have launched since 1957 account for approximately one-third of all cataloged objects now in Earth orbit. NASA said that the second and fourth most significant satellite breakups are Cosmos 2251 and Iridium 33 spacecraft, which were involved in the first ever accidental satellite collision February 2009.
This is something that giant killer lasers can totally fix. We should also deploy them in space, and create an advanced AI to autonomously control them, so it can clean up the skies for us.
What could possibly go wrong?
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
He who puts things in the orbit should be obliged to remove it from there if no longer needed or defunct...