This is weird. I read this article and instead of being alarmed at the thought of the destruction of both coasts and a never ending cloud of dust......I focus instead on the math. The article claims there are over 40,000 satellites in orbit. Really? No, really? A quick search of Sputnik, the first satellite, shows that it went up in 1957. It's 2008. That's 51 years (says Captain Obvious). That's 18,615 days give or take. That's 2.15 satellites per day being launched into space since the first one. So, I'm also guessing that 2 per day didn't start flying the day after Sputnik went? Right? If only one per month went up for the first decade....how many does that leave for the last 10 years? I find that number hard to believe - very hard to believe. Could it be a typo? I'm too tired to research it. Why do I care? 40,000? Give me some quarters.
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From an article I found:
"In 1964 the first TV satellite was launched into a geostationary orbit in order to transmit the Olympic games from Tokyo.
Since then hundreds of communication satellites have been launched and Earth's atmosphere still bears the scars.
A European Space Agency (ESA) computer-generated picture shows a view from space with the planet surrounded by a snowstorm of space debris.
Much of it is junk with telecommunications equipment that once cost millions now past its sell-by date yet still in orbit.
ESA says the number of objects in Earth's atmosphere has risen steadily increasing by 200 per year on average and that there are now 600 working satellites.
Collisions, explosions and lost or discarded material from space flights and rockets has resulted in the atmosphere resembling a junk yard with potentially millions of pieces of metal travelling in permanent orbit 20,000 miles above the Earth."
i believe there may be 40,000 individual pieces of space debris....some collisions probably make 1,000s. I think Japan or China recently blew up a satellite way out of orbit that we werent real happy about because of the amount of space junk it left. we chose to wait until it was close enough that it would fall and burn.
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