Quote Originally Posted by McLeodGanja
That could be potentially lethal if your on a space walk! Or even in a space craft. Typical of the Chinese government, no respect for the environment.
Right now collisions between space junk and functioning satelites or between space junk and other space junk are relatively rare, but they do happen. There is a theory that if there is enough space junk, then eventually it will reach a "tipping point" or "critical mass" in which collisions create more fragments, which make more collisions, and more fragments, and so on unitl we have a lethal layer of fragments. They refer to it as a "cascade."

Somtimes one part of the Chinese government does not know what another is doing. One part of the Chinese government was set to host an international conference about how to avioid the theoretical space junk "cascade" at about the same time another part decided to blow a satelite into a thousand pieces. It served as a great embarrassment to the Chinese at the conference that their own government had committed an act that may yet make a debris cascade inevitable.
dragonrider Reviewed by dragonrider on . Be prepared to duck sometime around February BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Satellite could plummet to Earth Rating: 5