Eppur si muove

Above your head, at this moment, there are several thousand tons of garbage.

Not metaphorical garbage. Actual objects.

Aluminum panels. Dead satellites. Shattered solar arrays. Bolts, screws, flakes of paint. A glove once dropped by an astronaut and never recovered. All of it moving faster than a rifle bullet, all of it invisible to the naked eye.

Most of it is traveling at roughly $7.7\text{km/s}$

At that speed, a coin has the kinetic energy of a truck. A fragment smaller than your fingernail can end a billion-dollar mission. Scale does not forgive you in orbit.

And yet, nothing up there is trying to hurt anything.

It is simply obeying gravity.

When something is “in orbit,” it is not floating. It is falling.

It is falling continuously and missing the Earth continuously. This delicate failure to crash is what we call stability.

If the Earth has mass $M$ and radius $R$, and an object of mass $m$ sits at distance $r$, gravity pulls with

Circular motion demands

Set them equal and you get

This is not a design parameter. It is a demand imposed by the universe.

Miss it slightly, and you decay. Miss it badly, and you fall. Hit it, and you join the ring of debris.

Every satellite is a temporary compromise with inevitability.

We often speak of “stable orbits,” but this is a polite fiction.

Nothing is stable.

The upper atmosphere steals energy molecule by molecule. Solar radiation applies a constant, silent pressure. The Moon pulls sideways. The Earth is lumpy. Time itself perturbs trajectories.

So orbits deform. Slowly. Invisibly. Relentlessly.

Until one day, two paths intersect.

And something breaks.

In 1978, Donald Kessler noticed that this process contains a terrifying feedback loop.

If the number of objects in orbit becomes large enough, collisions create fragments. Fragments create more collisions. Collisions create more fragments.

A cascade.

A simple model captures the danger:

where $N$ is the number of objects, $\alpha$ represents collision growth, and $\beta$ represents decay.

When $\alpha N>\beta$, the system runs away.

Forever.

This is the Kessler Syndrome: a civilization surrounding itself with knives.

There is something quietly tragic about this.

Every fragment began as hope.

A proposal. A budget. A launch countdown. Applause in a control room. Someone saying, “We’re go for liftoff.”

Then a battery failed. A valve stuck. A company collapsed. A program lost funding. A software bug went unnoticed.

And now the object circles the Earth in silence, seven kilometers per second, for centuries.

A fossil of intention.

A memory with momentum.

The kinetic energy of one kilogram is about thirty million joules.

Enough to melt steel. Enough to punch holes in pressurized cabins. Enough to erase decades of work in a millisecond.

All stored in something the size of a coin.

Space is gentle to nothing.

So we try to clean it.

We design nets. Harpoons. Drag sails. Ion beams. Laser nudges. Autonomous collectors. Elegant machines whose sole purpose is to repair the side effects of earlier machines.

Engineering correcting engineering.

A species debugging itself.

Sometimes it works. Often it doesn’t. But the attempt matters.

This is not really a story about space.

It is a story about systems.

Every sufficiently complex system accumulates residue.

Codebases collect dead functions. Cities collect abandoned buildings. Institutions collect outdated rules. Minds collect bad habits. And of course.. Orbits collect debris.

We call it technical debt. Or moral debt. Or orbital debt.

Different words. Same structure.

Ignore it long enough, and it becomes destiny.

And still, I find this whole enterprise strangely beautiful.

That we place fragile objects around a violent planet and ask them to fall forever without landing.

That we notice when things drift. That we write equations about millimeters per second. That we argue passionately about perturbation terms. That we care.

Even when we fail, we fail thoughtfully.

That matters.

Somewhere above you right now is a broken thing, moving very fast, for no reason except that once, someone believed it was worth building.

Very romantic if you ask me.