What happens when one satellite crashes into another and then another?

Can such collisions actually trigger an irreversible cascade that eventually destroys everything

we've got in orbit and makes Earth's local space a useless zone of death?

Luckily we don't have to wonder because we've got the science-based answer for you.

This coming right up UnSkeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.

Space junk, the real risk, and what to do about it.

Rarely as a Hollywood movie placed a real danger so squarely into the minds of a general

public who had never thought too much about it then was done with 2013's Gravity, starring

Sandra Bullock and George Clooney.

The movie portrayed a runaway syndrome in which orbital debris from an anti-satellite

missile explosion struck other objects in orbit, destroying them and creating even more

debris.

Ultimately becoming an irrecoverable cascade which destroyed nearly everything up there

and rendered the entire low-earth orbit useless for generations.

We all left the movie theater wondering, I know Space junk is a problem, but could it

really get that bad?

Well, today we're going to see where the line lies between fact and hyperbole.

There's actually theory that attempts to answer this question as it's fairly self-evident

that debris in orbit poses a danger to spacecraft and also self-evident that the amount of

debris is increasing as we've launched more and more stuff over the decades.

Anastrophysicist named Donald Kessler co-authored a paper characterizing the problem in 1978.

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