Name: What If We Trashed Earth's Orbit With Space Junk?
Uploaded: 2020-04-04T07:55:20.000Z
Duration: 3 min 51 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

we're trapping ourselves on our own planet.

if we trashed Earth's orbit with space junk.

Almost everything that we've launched into space

ends up either falling down and burning up in the atmosphere,

or getting caught in the Earth's lower orbit for thousands of years.

by just 200 kg (440 lbs) of small, rocky debris

of about 3 million kg (6.6 million lbs) of space junk.

20,000 pieces of debris as large as softball,

and many millions of pieces of debris too small to track

What makes these floating parts of old satellites

This junk is hurtling through space at a speed of 8 km/s (5 mi/s).

But it's what comes next that could hold off our dreams

The more junk we leave uncontrolled in the Earth's lower orbit,

Fragments of debris are colliding and breaking up,

And they're hitting working spacecraft, too.

to initiate an unstoppable, destructive chain reaction.

The cascade of collisions would make our lower orbit

that eventually there would be no active spacecraft left.

Everything in the Earth's orbit would be turned into

We'd have to put our space missions on pause,

and we'd be trapped on the planet for generations.

Well, the debris belt wouldn't rain down on Earth

Space rubbish would disintegrate in the atmosphere

But the collisions would produce a lot of dust.

would cause an ever-present twilight on the planet.

you'd forget what nights used to look like.

all of our satellite networks would go down.

and no way to do any science in the Earth's orbit.

On a positive note, science has already come up with a few ideas

They're looking at capturing space debris with a net,

or vaporizing the small bits of junk with lasers.

we should act quick if we want to launch humanity

Subtitles ListPlay Video

What If We Trashed Earth's Orbit With Space Junk?

eventually

massive

present

positive