The threat isn’t just in space. In March part of a pallet from a discarded International Space Station battery fell to Earth, smashing through the roof of a Florida home. In 2020 an Ivory Coast village recovered a 12-­meter-­long pipe from space, courtesy of a Chinese rocket that cast off its empty core after launch. And a 2022 Nature Astronomy study puts the odds of space junk killing someone on the ground at 10 percent every decade. Needlessly.