In November 2021, a missile destroyed a dead satellite on purpose and scattered the orbit it had been sharing with the International Space Station. The astronauts spent the next hours sheltering in the capsules that could carry them home.
The target was Cosmos 1408, a defunct Soviet-era satellite, and the test was a Russian direct-ascent anti-satellite weapon. The destruction produced more than fifteen hundred trackable fragments and many more too small to follow. As the station passed near the fresh debris cloud, the crew sealed themselves in their docked spacecraft as a precaution.
- Event: Cosmos 1408 anti-satellite test
- Date: November 15, 2021
- Debris: 1,500+ trackable fragments
- Effect: ISS crew sheltered in docked craft
Debris on purpose
Most debris is the byproduct of doing something useful. This was the byproduct of destroying something deliberately.
Cleanup can never keep pace if hardware keeps getting added to the pile on purpose. That is not an engineering problem so much as an awareness one, and awareness is exactly what these free tools are built to create. You cannot fix a problem people cannot see.
An orbit is a shared room. It is hard to think of a ruder way to use one.
Open the live tracker →Sources: 2021 anti-satellite missile test · NASA