Kessler Syndrome is not a new idea. It was theorized a long time ago – a situation where debris and space junk in Low Earth Orbit reaches a density where an impact can cause a chain reaction of chaotic incidents, making space travel drastically more dangerous and taking out satellites en masse.
It sounds like one of those absurd sci-fi ideas: space is big, so filling it up to the point where an entire orbital area goes into billiards from hell doesn’t seem reasonable. But space is also very fast, meaning that because individual pieces of debris can cover a lot of “ground”, the scenario is more likely than you might think.
But what to do about it? Well, in addition to trying to dispose of our junk responsibly by boosting it into decaying orbits and letting it burn up in the atmosphere, we could plan operations specifically to, you know, clean up after ourselves. This is where Planetes comes in.
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