KESSLER EFFECT, HERE WE COME: Space collision: Chinese satellite got whacked by hunk of Russian rocket in March. “The nightmare scenario that satellite operators and exploration advocates want to avoid is the Kessler syndrome — a cascading series of collisions that could clutter Earth orbit with so much debris that our use of, and travel through, the final frontier is significantly hampered.”

Heres’s a piece on space debris that Rob Merges and I wrote some years back.