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Defense contractors take on extraterrestrial enemy: space junk
By Kansas City Business Journal
5-16-14
One of the Pentagon’s biggest contracts this year — dubbed the Space Fence — would create a radar system to track all the debris floating in space and threatening to maim or destroy satellites or manned spacecraft, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The first piece of the $6 billion contract is worth $1 billion, the report says, and directs a contractor to build a powerful radar system that quintuples the amount of space junk it can monitor. The idea is to know where it all is so officials can warn satellite operators to move to avoid collisions.
It’s a bigger problem than you might think: About a half-million bits of man-made junk are buzzing around the Earth, from spent rocket parts to paint flecks, the report says. . . .
