Another three-ton object hurtles from its decaying orbit towards Earth, so today must be another day ending in “y”. Dying in the brimstone of space junk, however, is not our most pressing matter by a long shot. Not that space junk crashing into other space junk is a minor concern, given our dependence on global communications that the fragile “junk-o-sphere” makes possible. A critical mass of fragment-generating collisions could be a real game changer, and is yet just another reminder of our seemingly infinite human ability to err on the side heedlessness.
