00:00When you think of man-made objects floating around in space, you probably picture big
00:03satellites or even the International Space Station. Well, there's a lot more crap out there,
00:09and a scary new study found that nearly half of the man-made objects orbiting the Earth are
00:13actually uncontrollable space junk. Just three countries are fueling the problem, which is
00:20actually a problem for us Earthlings. All this interstellar rubbish could endanger future space
00:25travel. It's probably not surprising that the three countries making it worse are the United
00:29States, China, and Russia. They have famous space programs and thus account for a whopping 96%
00:34of the floating clutter. More than 15,000 of the over 33,000 objects that are tracked are discarded
00:41debris from space launches. That includes more than 2,000 rocket bodies, which can be hundreds of
00:46feet long. The other 17,000 objects zooming around out there are what I mentioned earlier, things that
00:52people like us use down here. Satellites, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, etc. If you need proof
00:58of how dangerous this could possibly get, look no further than 2016, when a fleck of paint or metal,
01:05not even a millimeter across, left a gouge in the window of the International Space Station.
01:10How did something so small do such damage? It was traveling at more than 20,000 miles an hour.
01:16Imagine if one of those big old rocket bodies traveling just as fast headed in the wrong direction.
01:22So what is being done about all this? Well, a bunch of private companies are attacking the problem,
01:26some possible solutions being researched include deploying sails, which create drag to accelerate
01:31the breakdown of a satellite's orbit, blasting debris with lasers known as brooms to drop debris
01:37into the atmosphere where it can burn up, and magnetic systems which collect the debris for removal.
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