To be honest, scale is hard to grasp. The total weight of space debris is 9500 tonnes, which may sound a lot but it’s the weight a larger fishing trawler.
Imagine cutting one up into fridge or car sized chunks and distributing the pieces over the entire surface of Earth. They would be quite sparse and the chance of randomly running into one would be quite tiny. The same would be true even if you make the chunks the size of your palm. And satellites are distributed in 3D.
It’s really not that much of a debris. The problem is not as much pollution as the increasing chance to be hit by a random piece.
-3
u/[deleted] 5d ago
[deleted]