This is the Guardian. On Tuesday the US became the first country in the world to announce a ban on anti-satellite missile tests.

And today on behalf of the United States of America, I call on all nations to join us.

The aim, according to Vice President Kamler Harris, is to help protect Earth's orbits.

When China and Russia destroyed their respective satellites.

It generated thousands of pieces of debris.

Debris that will now orbit our Earth for years if not decades.

The more we venture into space and depend on satellites up there for scientific monitoring, weather reports, GPS. on They are littered with old satellites spent rocket bodies and millions of tiny pieces of space

hardware.

Even tools astronauts have dropped during spacewalks.

And as you can imagine, obliterating old satellites with missiles doesn't exactly help.

The US has condemned Russia for conducting a dangerous and irresponsible missile test that it says endangered the crew aboard the International Space Station.

So is the US announcement the beginning of us behaving more responsibly and

sustainably in space or just like our bad habits back here on Earth?

We're risking our future off planet too?

I'm the Ensemble The Guardian Science Editor, and this is Science Weekly. Don Polacko, you're a professor of astrophysics and head of the

center of space domain awareness at the University of Warwick and so one of your big interests is this growing issue of space

debris. How bad is it really the whole space debris problem? Well there are already

some orbits that have a significant risk of collision, but I think the real thing about this is that for many years we have just ignored the problem. Only material in the lowest orbits de-orbits into the Earth's atmosphere

but the rest of it just stays there and the problem is it's moving around at such high speeds

if it crashes into anything else, it produces more debris.

Now just to get this into a context, an object the size of a P contains enough

energy at the speeds they're moving at to totally disable a spacecraft.

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