Kathleen Curlee , and Lauren Kahn
On November 4, 2025, a piece of space debris collided with China’s Shenzhou-20 spacecraft. This forced China to delay the return of its three astronauts while engineers and authorities assess the damage to the craft. Although the exact nature of the strike and the extent of the damage are unknown, it is possible that the offending piece of space junk was no bigger than a few millimeters. But at orbital speeds, debris can collide with objects in space nearly ten times faster than the speed of a bullet.
What is more concerning is that there are tens of thousands of pieces of debris larger than 10 centimeters, each capable of crippling satellites or endangering crews, and there is currently no reliable way to remove them. More concerning still, many of these hazards were not the result of accidents. They were generated through deliberate anti-satellite (ASAT) tests.
On January 11, 2007, China used an ASAT weapon to destroy its aging Fengyun (FY-1C) polar-orbit weather satellite, creating a cloud of debris that persists to this day. ASAT weapons involve the deliberate destruction of satellites in orbit, often using kinetic interceptors launched from Earth. The strike was hardly unprecedented: both the United States and the Soviet Union tested ASAT systems during the Cold War. However, those strikes rarely created significant debris because they were conducted at lower altitudes.
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