Space junk could cause war, say researchers - CNET

How is this so? Well, as the Guardian reports, Russian space scientists say that there's every chance one of the bits of space junk could accidentally smack into a military satellite.

Now you know what happens when a military satellite suffers a hit. Someone with a hair-trigger mentality will assume it's an attack from a foreign power and immediately want to strike back.

The scientists have published a report detailing their fears in Acta Astronautica. In it, Vitaly Adushkin of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow says that space junk poses a "special political danger."

So do half of the world's politicians, you might say. But we deal with that. What's so special about space junk?

Adushkin believes there might be some ignorance involved in assessing the real cause of the spatial disturbance.

He writes that a fender-bender between some space junk and a military satellite "may provoke political or even armed conflict between space-faring nations. The owner of the impacted and destroyed satellite can hardly quickly determine the real cause of the accident."

There's the problem. Humans are reactive.

Currently, there are said to be around 21,000 pieces of space garbage over 10cms (around 3.9 inches) floating around. There are another 500,000 bits measuring between 1-10 cms (around 0.4-4 inches). Most of these are flying around very quickly.

Already, writes Adushkin, there have been incidents involving defense satellites. In 2013, a Russian satellite called Blits was blitzed by debris that apparently came from a destroyed Chinese weather satellite. And in 2014, the Inteational Space Station had to swerve to avoid space junk five times.

There have been fears for some time about how space junk might wreck our lives. In 2011, the Pentagon waed that it could have the heinous consequence of knocking out our cell phones.