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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Shooting debris with missiles just makes more debris. Things don’t just disappear. Explosions just make stuff into smaller pieces of stuff and add velocity to those pieces in all sorts of directions. The missile itself is composed of materials which, after an explosion, would become space debris.
The trouble is that, with anything in orbit, to truly get it out, you need to either slow it down enough that it falls to Earth or accelerate it a lot to get it to escape the draw of Earth’s gravity.
With the missile solution, some debris would likely be directed towards Earth, but the remnants of the missile and the unpredictability of where all the small bits of debris will be accelerated towards make it a larger problem in the long run.
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