Space, The Final Frontier or Garbage Dump

Well, I haven't found much to laugh at lately but for some reason the news that a Russian and an American satellite collided caught my attention. The US commercial communications satellite, Iridium, collided with a defunct Russian satellite. Nasa sources said they knew this would probably happen at some point. Since the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957 some 6000 satellites have been put into orbit. Getting a little crowded up there, right?

Apparently they collided over Siberia and the Americans are now following the debris path to see if the ISS or the shuttle launch could be in the path. An orbital debris expert at the Johnson Space Center in Houston ( there's a job for you) said that the Hubble Space Telescope and other earth observing satellites at hight altitudes could be at higher risk.

Really inspires confidence doesn't it. Let's see we have space junk, dead satellites, a lost tool bag from the shuttle and a lot of other stuff floating around up there. So what do we need first, a traffic cop or a garbage collector? Some of the traffic cops I have seen are intertaining in their quest to move traffic smoothly. But with all that stuff up there, maybe some garbage company would like an out of this world contract. Of course the way my garbage collectors are, I would love to kick them into outer space.

I guess, in time, we will all see what shakes out and falls to earth. Remember Area 51? 6000 satellites and counting. What would Captain Kirk say? Spock would probably look for a logical solution and Scotty would probably say bag all that debris and send it to the Klingons where, like the tribbles, it will be no tribble at all.