AST test adds to celestial road rage

With four million pounds of space junk in the form of dead satellites, leaking booster hulks and trash from previous missions hurtling around the earth in low orbit, the American satellite-dependent economy faces some serious challenges. When the People's Republic of China military demonstrated its new anti-satellite capacity by atomizing an old weather satellite in 2007, many experts believed it was a deliberate and alarming demonstration. The successful attack increased the known space junk debris about 20-30% (see above computer-generated image - the red dots represent the new China debris; the green dots represent existing active LEO satellites and space trash).

I wrote about this and more in my Chicago column on MidwestBusiness.com earlier today. If you care to read more, go to: http://www.midwestbusiness.com/news/viewnews.asp?newsletterID=18757 for the 1-31-09 edition of "The Hoosier Coefficient."