--- title: Space Debris: Worry—a Little description: But we really ought to get used to falling space junk, because there's no shortage of rubbish in space. canonical: https://time.com/2976883/space-debris-falling/ author: Jeffrey Kluger article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-07-11T21:38:54.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T08:01:07.627Z article:section: Science og:title: Look Out! Satellite Debris is Coming Home og:description: But we really ought to get used to falling space junk, because there's no shortage of rubbish in space. og:url: https://time.com/2976883/space-debris-falling/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt865a25c2e83ba4c6/69869b6fcd804d3b5dccbe4a/spacedebris.jpg?branch=production&width=640&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 640 og:image:height: 360 og:image:alt: Clean up your room: A NASA rendering of the low Earth orbit debris field og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Look Out! Satellite Debris is Coming Home twitter:description: But we really ought to get used to falling space junk, because there's no shortage of rubbish in space. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt865a25c2e83ba4c6/69869b6fcd804d3b5dccbe4a/spacedebris.jpg?branch=production&width=640&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # You Should Worry (a Little) About Falling Space Debris > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: September 2026. ## TIME Newsletters: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition TIME publishes seven free email newsletters, written and edited by TIME journalists, reaching more than 1.1 million engaged readers. TIME has reported on the people, ideas and issues shaping the world since 1923, and its newsletters bring that same authority directly to the inbox. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=e4f1f244-e635-42e0-9115-eee2b4c50f75&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Astronauts Talk to Time About Life Aboard The International Space Station [Watch (HLS stream): Astronauts Talk to Time About Life Aboard The International Space Station](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/TNgMmJJR.m3u8) (9:38)  _Published 2014-07-09. Astronauts Talk About Life Aboard The International Space Station_  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Jul 11, 2014 9:38 PM UTC  Clean up your room: A NASA rendering of the low Earth orbit debris field Clean up your room: A NASA rendering of the low Earth orbit debris field NASA/JSC  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Jul 11, 2014 9:38 PM UTC Australia knows a thing or two about getting clobbered by stuff from space. It was in 1979 that America’s out-of-control Skylab space station came auguring in from orbit and scattered its remains across the Australian outback—a story captured by this [memorable TIME cover](http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19790716,00.html). On Thursday there was a repeat performance, when a truck-sized piece of debris from a Russian rocket [streaked across the skies over Melbourne](http://time.com/2976128/great-ball-of-fire-russian-space-trash-flies-over-australia/)—this time in the era of smartphones, which meant that videos and stills of the fireworks went viral instantly, with all sorts of sky-is-falling commentary. That, in fairness, is perfectly understandable. There’s no light show quite like an incoming meteor or other hunk of ordnance—equal parts exhilarating and terrifying, depending on the size of whatever’s heading earthward. But we really ought to get used to these events, because there’s no shortage of rubbish in space — and the cosmic junk yard is only growing. It’s been nearly 60 years since Russia’s Sputnik satellite went into orbit, starting its brief life as the planet’s first artificial moon and ending it as its first bit of space garbage. The satellite itself wasn’t the only piece of rubbish that was involved. Its spent booster fell back toward Earth well before Sputnik reached orbit, but all manner of minor debris—bolts, paint chips and other shards of stuff—made it to space. In the six decades since, those early bits of litter have multiplied exponentially. According to NORAD, NASA and other groups that track space debris, there are at least 21,000 orbiting objects 10 cm (3 in.) or larger currently circling the Earth, at least 500,000 in the 1 to 10 cm range, and more than 100 million smaller than 1 cm. The [Union of Concerned Scientists lists 1,167](http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear%5Fweapons%5Fand%5Fglobal%5Fsecurity/solutions/space-weapons/ucs-satellite-database.html) operational satellites now in orbit—and there may be at least as many dead ones. All of them, eventually, will have to come home, and that gets people spooked, but it shouldn’t—at least not most of the time. First of all, most satellites will incinerate on their way down, though the bigger a piece of junk is and the denser the materials that make it up, the greater the chance it has of striking the surface. Still, fully 70% of that surface is water and most of the land that’s left is entirely uninhabited or only sparsely so. Yes, a burnt-out satellite falling earthward with central Shanghai in its crosshairs would create a deadly mess, but any one individual’s odds of getting hit (which, like it or not, is how most of us reckon these things) are very low. [NASA’s](http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/) and NORAD’s continuous surveillance lowers that risk even further by modeling orbits and predicting just which pieces are coming in next, and [some websites](http://www.satview.org/decay.php) make it easy for the public to stay up-to-date too. The much greater risk from out of control satellites is not to people on Earth, but to other objects still in orbit. Even then though, collisions are less common than they’d seem. The biggest of the relatively small handful of [errors in the blockbuster _Gravity_](http://science.time.com/2013/10/01/what-gravity-gets-right-and-wrong-about-space/) was (unfortunately) its central premise, which was that a collision between two satellites had created a high speed storm of debris that was racing around Earth in the same orbit as the shuttle and space station and pummeling both structures on each pass. But orbital physics make that impossible. All objects in the same orbit move at the same speed, so a collision between them is no more likely than if all of the cars on a highway were moving at exactly 60 mph. The gap between any two would never widen or narrow at all. The moment an orbiting object increases its speed even a little, it climbs to a higher orbit, in the same way a lasso will strain to inscribe a wider circle—and will if you loosen your grip on the rope enough—when you spin it faster. When a satellite slows, it drops to a lower orbit. It’s in those orbital shifts that a collision risk exists. There’s an even greater danger if two satellites orbiting at the same altitude but at different inclinations—say 23º and 56º above the equator—cross paths. Here the accident is more analogous to a westbound car running a stop sign and colliding with a northbound one in the intersection. Such an [accident happened in 2009](http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1879241,00.html), when an active American satellite and a defunct Russian one crossed paths 500 miles (800 km) above Siberia. Both of those ships were utterly demolished—which naturally led to a lot of nervous gulps about what would have happened if one of them had been carrying people, though the same regular satellite tracking that goes on every day would likely allow a crewed ship to take evasive action well in advance. Of greater concern is small debris, the kind that’s way too tiny to see but powerful enough to do real damage. The back-of-the-envelope calculation back in the Apollo days was that a chip of paint moving at orbital speed packs about as much of a wallop as a bowling ball moving at 60 mph (96 k/h), and those physics haven’t changed—and never will. Shielding on big-target structures like the space station helps reduce that risk, though nothing can eliminate it entirely. Ultimately, the answer, as with any environmental issue on Earth, is for people to quit making such a mess of space and clean up what’s already there. But consider how often we actually follow that straightforward advice on Earth. So again: gulp. ## Transcript We're at the Time studios in Midtown Manhattan, and right about now, the International Space Station is 230 miles overhead, passing by at 17, 500 miles per hour. In a moment, we'll be chatting live with three of the station six crew members, Commander Steve Swanson, and Flight Engineer Reid Wiseman of NASA as well as Flight Engineer Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency. Well thank you for being with us today, and I wanted to just jump right in and ask you what time did you guys punch in for work this morning and what does the day ahead look like? We started about 7: 30 this morning, and the rest of the day is various things. You have science. Science. I have some repairs to do. What do you have today Alex? I have several little science experiments already today. And I think for the rest of the day, we have a training event for the new cargo vehicle we expect, orbital, that's coming in the next two weeks, so we're actually gonna use the station manipulator to do some practice grapple with it. And then, in the evening, I think I have a little bit more science experience. So it's a, quite various varied day. It's, it's pretty nice. So it's about a 12 hour day? Yeah, when you include the working out we have to do, it's about a 12 hour day. And Reid, this one's for you. You've been a big presence on Twitter and social media, something the astronauts of the Apollo era never had to think about. So how do, how do you see the astronaut's job changing over the decades? Well, I think the astronauts have always wanted to share their journey with as many people as possible, and I think Apollo with the tools they had they did a phenomenal job. We're just looking to live in this day where, you know, I take a photograph with a with a camera and we just come back and we can email it straight into our Twitter feed and it just does, it makes it so much easier to share this experience. And so, it's almost just become a little collateral duty of ours. So you don't even think about it through the day. It's so easy but it's appreciated, and we really enjoy doing it. And you're keeping in touch with the world that way, but how do you keep in touch with your families? You're gone for a long time. Yeah. We're gone for about five and a half to six months. And NASA does a great job of helping us keep in touch with our families. So, once a week we actually get to do a fairly short video conference. So, I've been talking to my wife and kids. I even had one with my mom and dad. So, that's really been fantastic and that kind of support is really special for us up here and really, really increases the moral on the weekends. And are you able to email back and forth, or is that just not available? No we had the chance of emailing pretty much the whole day. Once in a whole if we have two minutes between two experiments, we can go to our computer stations and then just send an email and receive. So actually I feel more in touch with my family right now than I did during most of the training because my family lives in Europe and the, the time distance from Houston is actually quite uncomfortable to have a telephone conversation because it's either early in the morning for one party. So up here for me it's easier. That's sort of remarkable I think. This one's for Alex. Congratulations on yesterday's World Cup score. And how well have you been able to follow Germany's deep run to the final round? We, we were actually pretty lucky that most of the games happen during the evening hours that we had here so after our work was done we got some live feed actually from mission control in Houston. So, that's never guaranteed and it only works when we have some bandwidth left, but we were pretty lucky. So, most of the games of the US and Germany, we, we saw live and that, that was, of course, a, a good treat for us. And there were a lot of wows yesterday as you'd imagine. [ LAUGH ]. I would imagine, down on Earth too. And speaking of the World Cup, Steve, it was mostly fun and games when Germany beat the US in the first round, but the recent US Russian friction over Ukraine is a far more serious matter. And the other three members of your crew are Russian cosmonauts. Does that kind of thing ever present a problem in the close quarters of a space station? No it does not. We've become good friends with our Russian colleagues. We've trained with them for a long time. We've been up here with them for a long time and that kind of issues don't arise for us. It doesn't cause any kind of friction. And I imagine the fact that you look out the window and you see no borders visible from space makes it gives you a whole different perspective on things. Yes, it does. As I've sorted out. We also watched the Russia or the soccer games together. So that kind of bonds us together, too. Absolutely. We've got a handful of questions from some of our readers. This one comes from a young reader named Luke who wants to know, what do you miss most from Earth? Again, you're up there for a long time. It's the simple things that I think you miss most. For me personally I miss a shower, a nice warm shower in the morning. If we could get that going up here, wow, that would be something really, really super. But for now that's the number one thing. I did see, I did see on a TV show a couple days ago, a family sat down and had a big pizza with a soda and, man [ LAUGH ] I was, at that point I was missing pizza a little bit more than the than the shower, but overall that's where we are. We actually did get three pizza questions from readers so they were right on the money there. From some of our, our photography fans who read time, what cameras do you use? And are there limitations on what cameras can be used in space? Can you just use an iPhone to take a picture up there? Well, you could take an iPhone, but of course what we see out the window, it's so beautiful that we need something with a little bit more resolution. So we have like professional SLR cameras. Also the lenses, sometimes, like if you wanna, take a picture of a typhoon or a hurricane you need a wide angle lens. So and then if you want to take a picture of your hometown you have this huge 800 millimeter lens and you can actually see houses, individual houses and. It's pretty amazing what you can do. And also, it's amazing to see what the caustic radiation does. Like we really have to use up these cameras. Like they only last for a half a year or a year. And then, the, the pixel damage through caustic radiation is so big that we actually bring up new ones. And I imagine the view of the nighttime sky, or it's always a nighttime sky, of course, is radically different with no atmospheric interference. That is true. The stars do not twinkle up here. They just are pin points. And there're so many of 'em. It's so beautiful. Where do you go for privacy? The station as much habitable space as, I think, a 747 and yet, that's all the space you've got. Do you ever find that you need a place to retreat and get a little time alone? You know, working with these guys, I'd almost say no. It's [ LAUGH ] it's always a good, it's always good fun. But we each actually do have, we each actually have our own little bedroom that's about the size of a telephone booth. So it could fit about you and we have two laptops in there that connect with the outside world. But really it's pretty comfortable and we treat those with the highest level of respect. So, my bedroom is my room and and that's my little place to go if I need some privacy, but to date, I mean it's really just been a sleeping quarters. Most of the time we're out here socializing, inviting our Russian crew members down or heading down to see them in the evenings and really it's, it's a good community living situation. And speaking of sleeping, do you dream differently in space? Is there something about the experience unconsciously knowing where you are that changes the way you experience dreams? Actually, I've been asked that question a lot and I, I, in the first weeks I never remembered my dreams. But I did have one dream that I remembered last week and that was actually with, with Reid launching on a rocket from Canada to fly to [ UNKNOWN ] from where we mounted that rocket onto a [ UNKNOWN ] and then flew to space. That I thought that was a pretty remarkable deed. [ LAUGH ] I'm wondering, another thing I notice at night, is actually that I sometimes, I wake up at night and I don't know where up and down is. Of course there's no up and down, and I believe that in that moment I think I'm head down or some way turned around, but then I switch on the light and I realize that I'm actually completely normal. So that happened to me quite a few times and I actually did hear that happens to, to other people once in awhile as well. And I'm sure there are lots of good days in space. What's the toughest day you've had out there. A day you were just happy to see come to an end and go to bed and forget about? There was a day where Alex took some hair clippers and he stood a little to close to me and our Commander Doctor Steve Lawson. And I gotta say I was happy when that day came to an end. [ LAUGH ] And you've got a few months for your hair to grow back. So that's good. And I guess this will be our final question. I know you don't get a lot of free time, but when you do have it, how much of that do you spend simply enjoying the view of the Earth outside your window? Almost all of it. That's one of our biggest free time events that we do up here. And then of course we, you always want to take a picture and share it. So then we spend the other part trying to process the pictures and get them down to everybody else. Well that's pretty much all that we do with our free time. Well thank you so much for making the time gentlemen. 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