The Chinese weather satellite Fengyun 1C was deliberately destroyed by China in an anti-satellite weapon test in 2007 and peppered low-Earth orbit with an estimated 3,000 pieces of shrapnel. In 2012, ...

Since the launching of Sputnik in 1957, an estimated 20,000 more satellites have been sent up into space. About 70% of those are still in orbit. Others have fallen back to Earth or started to break ...

In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. Several months later, the U.S. sent Explorer I into space. With two small objects, the space race began. As of March 2025, more than 11,000 satellites are ...

Mankind has littered the space around Earth with nearly 20,000 distinct, trackable objects of debris, but it all started with just one. As Grey notes, the amount of space debris we produced grew ...

WHEN Sputnik 1 beeped its way around the Earth in 1957, space was a very tranquil place. How things have changed. Today some 5000 tonnes of stuff is whirling around above our heads – equivalent to ...

A burgeoning blizzard of space debris is going to have a major impact on the future economics of space flight. That was the prediction made this week by Hugh Lewis of the University of Southampton, UK ...