TOKYO The 1999 Japanese manga "Planetes" depicts cleaning up space debris -- defunct satellites, spent rocket stages and other man-made objects floating in low Earth orbit -- as a commonplace job. This cannot be dismissed as a mere work of fiction: All that junk presents a very real problem for space development in the 21st century.
Economy
What keeps space pioneers up at night
Orbiting junk, cutthroat competition could shatter business dreams
Thousands of bits of jettisoned rocket and satellite components orbit Earth at speeds of more than 28,000kph. Although collisions with functioning satellites are rare, each collision can generate several thousand new bits of debris.
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