eli5 why is a higher amount of space junk a problem for us? Why can’t we shoot it away with missiles?
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Most of the space junk is larger pieces, such as defunct satellites or discarded rocket stages. If you shoot at them with missiles you will not actually change their orbits at all but just turn them into thousands of small pieces of space junk. So now instead of having to worry about one large piece which can be easily tracked by radar and which can easily be avoided we have to worry about thousands of tiny pieces which does not show up on radar and which is spread over too large a field to avoid. The pieces are going 30 times the speed of a bullet so the smaller pieces is going to be just as destructive as a large piece.
In order to actually get rid of the space junk we have to change their orbits. You can not do this with a missile or a bullet because there is not enough energy in those. You need to somehow capture the junk and then slowly change its orbit using a rocket. We do not know how to do this effectively yet. Even worse the radars which are used to track the space junk was developed during the cold war to detect incoming ballistic missiles and are now being decommissioned due to their age and lack of funding. So not only do we not know how to clean up the orbits around Earth but we no longer have the radars to track the debris so they can be avoided.
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