Marshall Kaplan, co-founder and Director of Launchspace Technologies Corporation of Boca Raton, Florida, carves up space debris into three groups. A middle group goes from about 1 millimeter up to 10 centimeters. There are roughly millions of these pieces.
"The real question is what do we do about this? And, the answer is pretty straightforward," Kaplan said."We ignore anything bigger than 10 centimeters because the probability of collisions is sufficiently low that statistically this is not an issue." Decades of near-Earth space exploration and utilization have resulted in an increasingly jam-packed environment. Space debris is a growing threat to orbiting assets, human spaceflight and future access to outer space.