UK Space Industry Aims to Remove Dangerous Space Junk from Orbit By Thomas Pfeiffer and Thomas Seal | April 16, 2021 A defunct satellite spent early April hurtling through space toward the body of an old rocket, threatening a collision that the European Union’s Space Surveillance and Tracking Consortium estimated could generate more than 4 million pieces of debris. In the end, the two objects just missed each other, but the incident was a reminder of the increasing prevalence—and danger—of space junk. There are more than 8,000 tons of garbage in orbit, made up of about 26,000 objects wider than 10 centimeters, according to the European Space Agency. Any object of that size could destroy an active satellite, posing a constant threat to the systems that provide everything from weather observation to disaster management to military communications. The worst-case scenario is what’s known as the Kessler Syndrome, in which collisions create additional debris, leading to more collisions until whole swaths of orbit become unusable.