Satellites and other manmade objects in space provide us with some incredible services including access to the Internet, GPS, scientific research, and much more.

In addition to those great benefits, however, they are also creating an increasing risk of significant damage or even death when they fall out of the sky.

In the past, experts often said that the risk of problems due to falling space junk was astronomically small.

This was, at least in part, due to the fact that most of the objects in space were supposed to burn up when they entered the atmosphere, meaning it would never actually reach the ground to cause problems.

As it turns out, this is not turning out to be true.

With thousands of satellites currently in orbit around the Earth, and thousands more planned to go up in the coming years, this is a problem that is causing concern for many people.

Both scientific communities and government agencies are starting to look at these risks closer than they ever had in the past.

Marlon Sorge, the executive director of The Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies recently did an interview with Ars Technica.

“The biggest immediate need now is just to do some more work to really understand this whole process and to be in a position to be ready to accommodate new materials, new operational approaches as they happen more quickly. Clearly, that’s the direction that spaceflight is going.”

There are already examples of this space debris causing problems.

A piece of the International Space Station, for example, crashed through the roof of a Florida home. Luckily, nobody was injured in the event.

The challenges in addressing these problems are many.

The manager of the debris and disposal area within Aerospace’s situational awareness department commented on some of them.

“Is it tumbling? Is it reentering in a stable configuration? There are so many things that go into what actually happens during a reentry. It just makes it that much more complex to figure out if something is going to survive or not.”

Some people are considering how it might be possible to better manage the problem of space junk, like building machines that can launch up to space junk that is a suspected danger, and force it down in a safe and more controlled way.

Setting this up, however, would be a challenge all on its own.

This is an issue that has been talked about for decades.

Hopefully the experts can find ways to safely bring outdated space junk back home safely.

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