Between the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and today, humanity has collectively dropped tens of thousands of pieces of litter in low-Earth orbit. Some of it is large enough to keep an eye on, but most of it is too small to see. Worse, as space junk whips around the planet at more than 17,000 miles per hour, it inevitably smashes into other bits of junk, shattering into smaller but more numerous bits. When space exploration began, there wasn’t a lot of thought given to the ultimate fate of abandoned s