Â鶹ÒùÔº

Skip to main content

Schaub discusses growing space junk problem with Salon

Hanspeter Schaub

Outer space is incomprehensibly vast and empty. Yet over the past century, humans have managed to clutter a region known as low Earth orbit (LEO), which stretches from 125 to 1,200 miles above the surface of the planet, with "space debris." This broad category of man-made objects includes "dead" satellites, jettisoned rocket boosters, shrapnel from collisions, lost equipment such as cameras and spatulas, and chunks of frozen urine.

"It is not a simple problem," said Hanspeter Schaub, a professor of aerospace engineering sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. "And it's not just a technological problem — there's an economic aspect, a political aspect, a social aspect. It's a complex field."Ìý