Outer space could use a set of traffic laws — and cops who can enforce them.
The amount of both space junk and satellites orbiting the Earth now, the moon soon, and Mars eventually, poses a massive, unseen threat to people on the ground, wrote three scientists in a commentary.
The threat to humans isn’t so much about debris falling from the sky (although a major hunk did land in Kenya in January 2025) and hitting someone (the odds of that are possible, but infinitesimal) as it is about losing satellites that could interrupt cell phone communication, disrupt GPS services, and even shut down large portions of the Internet, among other things.
People tend to think of space as a vast, unlimited resource. The word itself evokes the notion of wide-open-ness. But they don’t understand the sheer number of objects in orbit now. Elon Musk’s Starlink services alone employs 7,500 ...
