In 1965, the American astronaut Edward White dropped a glove, and ever since it has been orbiting the earth at 17,000 miles per hour. This sounds like a quirky Trivial Pursuit answer — what is the deadliest garment in history? — but it could be about to give us all a galactic slap in the face. That glove is now joined by so much space trash that scientists are warning it could be poised to take out the satellites we depend on every day — and trap us here on a heating earth. In just fifty years of exploring space, humans have left 600,000 pieces of rubbish in space, all circling us at super-speed. When it is whirring so fast, a one millimetre fleck of paint hits you as hard as a .22 caliber bullet fired at point blank range. A hard-boiled pea is as dangerous as a 400-lb safe smacking into you at 60mph. And a chunk of metal the size of a tennis ball is as explosive as 25 sticks of dynamite. We are adding to this junk faster than ever before. There is no international agreement to not leave trash in the skies — […]