The space telescope is shattered by a broken satellite.



There's even a movie featuring a spaceship that specializes in cleaning up space junk.



Aren't we talking about movies or the distant future? 



The universe, which should be twinkling with stars, is already full of garbage.



Lights crossing the night sky.



It looks like a UFO, and seeing them line up makes me think of Galaxy Express 999, but what is it?



This is the Starlink satellite launched by Elon Musk.



It was praised for providing satellite internet communication to Ukraine in this war in Ukraine.



Currently, 2,000 Starlink satellites orbit the Earth, and all the white dots you see here are Starlink.



Why are there so many?



Existing communication satellites are in a very high orbit of 30,000 km, so it takes a long time for radio waves to travel and the communication speed is also slow.



Starlink sent satellites into low orbits to quickly increase the speed to 5G-class, but instead, at such low altitudes, because the transmission range of radio waves was narrow, wide-area communication was impossible.



To overcome this shortcoming, the number of satellites has been greatly increased.



Musk said he would make the internet possible with satellites anywhere in the world, and plans to launch 30,000 more in the future.



Currently, there are a total of 4,500 satellites floating on the earth, and half of them are already Starlink satellites, and companies around the world such as 7,000 Amazon, 13,000 Astra, 5,000 Boeing, and 6,000 Winweb are successively There are plans to put satellites into space orbit.



There are so many people shooting, is there really any room left in space?



As both of you are trying to launch satellites into low Earth orbit, the points where the orbits of the satellites intersect with each other have increased innumerable.



There will be more in the future, and it will be a lot harder to control.



Musk said that there is enough space to launch hundreds of thousands of satellites and there is no problem with control, but 40 Starlinks launched in February have already been swept away by the solar wind.



The fragments that come out like this, and the satellites that have expired and are broken, become space junk.



Space junk travels through space at 10 times the speed of a bullet, and there are 23,000 objects larger than 10 centimeters in diameter.



Canada's robot arm Canadadam attached to the space station had a hole in it because of space debris, and there have been cases where small pieces of garbage collided with the space station's glass.



In December of last year, Korea's Arirang 3 also nearly collided with other satellite fragments, so it hastily raised its altitude by 150m.



Academia is concerned about the 'Kessler Syndrome', which leads to another series of collisions as the number of satellites increases, which increases the amount of space debris, and this space debris collides with other satellites.



Obviously, low orbit satellites like Starlink can make a big difference in our lives.



However, the problem is that the speed at which satellites go up is faster than the speed of technology development to process and manage space junk, and this may lead to confrontation between countries beyond companies.



This is why it is more urgent to develop garbage disposal technology than to take the space land by shooting first to occupy orbit.



(Video coverage: Park Dae-young, Cho Chang-hyun, video editing: Yoon Tae-ho, CG: Jo Su-in, source: KARI ESA SpaceX)