New study: Everyone but China has pretty much stopped littering in low-Earth orbit | Since 2000, China has accumulated more dead rocket mass in long-lived orbits than the rest of the world combined. Worryingly, it’s only accelerating since the past 2 years
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/10/everyone-but-china-has-pretty-much-stopped-littering-in-low-earth-orbit/
16 Comments
post this over at r/Futurology and see how fast it gets deleted.
China is still using hypergolic fuels and dumping them on population centers, though new designs are cryogenic and they’re pushing towards reusability. It seems like sustainable spaceflight is something they’re aware of, it’s just not as big a priority.
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It would seem the Kessler Syndrome is inevitable.
you could say the same thing about coal, or oil, or anything on the path of industrialization. they’re at different stages of development. china is a leader in green energy now. and they’re going very quickly on space too
They do get very messy and careless with Long March upper stages.
China gives zero Fs. They pollute everything. The Yangtze river is the biggest source of ocean plastics. They use hypergolic fuels and launch over populated areas. They are the world’s largest producer of CO2 and it’s not even close. They use actual slave labor to produce the cheap stuff we buy.
Their motto should be “This is why we can’t have nice things.”
EDIT: I have enraged the CCP shills lol.
Not to excuse China, but it’s almost like the way the west polluted the atmosphere and water for centuries.
How do I say this. I don’t feel particularly inclined at this moment to believe anything a US space agency says about the Chinese. Knowing the type of government the US currently has, I can’t help but feel distrust, specially when it comes to such a competitor as is China.
Not that I support China in particular, but I find myself trusting US agencies and companies less and less
Don’t worry, now we litter in Upper-Earth orbit
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
|Jargon|Definition|
|——-|———|—|
|[cryogenic](/r/Space/comments/1nxb4ee/stub/nhm5dpd “Last usage”)|Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure|
| |(In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox|
|hydrolox|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
|[hypergolic](/r/Space/comments/1nxb4ee/stub/nhmdwar “Last usage”)|A set of two substances that ignite when in contact|
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Hey, that junk ain’t translucent! Look at China! Trying to stop global warming one rocket at a time…
This really sucks because all that junk is still in orbit, and it’s moving **FAST.** Some of it is so small that it’s basically undectable.
When you try to launch something into space, it can get hit by the junk and break off into *more* junk.
Repeat the process enough, and you’ve crammed orbit with so much flying crap that we can’t launch rockets (or even satellites) anymore because they just get demolished by said flying crap.
And unless we figure out an effective way to clean up after ourselves, that’s bad news for both space exploration and humanity’s long term future. We won’t be able to leave the planet should the need arise.
There’s a market for space waste cleanup, but unless the company is SpaceX…just about everyone else can’t get to space, don’t have anything other than prototypes a decade away from operation, or don’t have any intention of real commercialization (their ideas exist only as investor slide decks).
I think the question is also then..
WHO is responsible for the total cumulative sum of space junk out there?
Same as WHO is responsible for the cumulative sum of carbon/pollution that we’re dealing with.