May 10, 2011 07:36 GMT  ·  By

According to a senior official from the United States Air Force (USAF), the number of objects classified as space junk today is bound to increase more than three times over within the next two decades, with disastrous consequences for space programs around the world,

Currently, there are more than 50 countries involved – either directly or indirectly – in exploiting outer space, and this is visible in the number of debris that are littering numerous altitudes around the planet.

At this point, several solutions are proposed for taking care of this mess, but some of them are not even worth the money experts ask in order to investigate them further. Rather, the USAF official said, the most probable scenario is one in which certain orbital altitudes are abandoned entirely.

The commander of the USAF Space Command, General William Shelton, said at a recent conference in Boulder, Colorado, that the amount of man-made space junk is increasing yearly, at a constant pace.

About 20,000 objects are currently being tracked by his Command alone, Shelton told attendants at the 27th National Space Symposium, which was organized by the Space Foundation.

“The traffic is increasing. We've now got over 50 nations that are participants in the space environment. We catalog those routinely and keep track of them. That number is projected to triple by 2030, and much of that is improved sensors, but some of that is increased traffic,” Shelton explained.

“Then if you think about it, there are probably 10 times more objects in space than we're able to track with our sensor capability today,” the official went on to say, as quoted by Space.

“Those objects are untrackable […] yet they are lethal to our space systems – to military space systems, civil space systems, commercial – no one’s immune from the threats that are on orbit today, just due to the traffic in space,” the General said.

As such, low-Earth orbit (LEO) and geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO) – the two most commonly used orbits around our planet – may become real battlefields in the near future. They are already clogged with junk, despite containing some high-value assets such as the International Space Station (ISS).

“We haven’t found a way yet that is affordable and gives us any hope for mitigating space debris. The best we can do, we believe, is to minimize debris as we go forward with our operations,” Shelton said.

“As we think about how we launch things, as we deploy satellites, minimizing debris is absolutely essential and we’re trying to convince other nations of that imperative as well,” he added,

Back in 2009, a Russian and an America satellite collided in orbit, creating a shower of space debris that got spread all over the place. This single event made it a lot more dangerous to travel to orbit, and it may have also represented the start of a cascading series of events.