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Since the dawn of the space age, more than 20 000 objects larger than a softball have accumulated in Earth’s orbit. About 1000 of those objects are spacecraft that carry active payloads, serving many valuable missions for mankind. But the rest could best be called junk, the by-product of thousands of launches and routine spacecraft deployments, nearly 200 explosions, and several collisions. And this junk poses a serious problem.

Many years ago, early orbital debris researchers predicted that parts of Earth’s orbit could eventually become so crowded that accidental collisions would fuel a self-reinforcing boom in the hazardous debris population—even if we put a stop to future launches.

That runaway debris generation scenario, often called the Kessler syndrome, may seem far off. But in fact, the sheer density of derelict objects in orbit has already exceeded what many consider to be the mathematical point of no return.

In some of the most congested regions of low earth orbit, this point was actually passed more than 10 years ago, although the onslaught of chain-reaction collisions will likely take decades to pick up steam. As a result, the threat of this potentially catastrophic domino effect has remained largely invisible. We’ve seen only one bellwether: the violent collision in 2009 of an active Iridium communications satellite with a derelict Russian payload called Cosmos 2251....

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