DENVER BUSINESS JOURNAL - A lot of companies strive to leave less of a mark on the planet. In aerospace, companies are starting to make it a priority to have less impact hundreds of miles above it, at the edge of space.
The push is more of a matter of industry preservation than it is environmental sustainability.
Orbits where satellites and space vehicles go are increasingly crowded with junk. Space junk orbits as fast as 17,000 miles an hour.
As watchers of the movie "Gravity" understand, even small items orbiting at such speeds can be a big problem. A stray bolt can cripple a satellite that took far more than $200 million to build and launch and that beams back communication or TV signals worth even more to its owner.
What's up there is everything from tools released by astronauts to satellites that have stopped working. And a lot of hardware is left over thousands of launches conducted during the past 60 years of spaceflight. Many upper stages of rockets still circulate the globe up there -- metal cases with unspent rocket fuel inside.
Read the full report on the Denver Business Journal: http://bit.ly/1kHbQKB.
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