I can't help thinking that this could become an increasingly common occurrence. And as the amount of debris build up, near-earth becomes increasingly hostile.
Space junk, according to Wikipedia:
Consists of everything from entire spent rocket stages and defunct satellites to explosion fragments, paint flakes, dust, and slag from solid rocket motors, coolant released by RORSAT nuclear powered satellites, deliberate insertion of small needles, and other small particles.[1] Clouds of very small particles may cause erosive damage, like sandblasting.
And measures to mitigate the problem have been proposed:
Taking satellites out of orbit operational life would also be an effective mitigation measure. This could be facilitated with a "terminator tether," an electrodynamic tether that is rolled out, and slows down the spacecraft.[7] In cases when a direct (and controlled) de-orbit would require too much fuel, a satellite can also be brought to an orbit where atmospheric drag would cause it to de-orbit after some years.
And then there's the cleanup:
Proposals have been made for ways to "sweep" space debris back into Earth's atmosphere, including automated tugs, laser brooms to vaporize or nudge particles into rapidly-decaying orbits, or huge aerogel blobs to absorb impacting junk and eventually fall out of orbit with them trapped inside. However, most current efforts are being devoted to prevention of collisions by keeping track of the larger debris, and prevention of more debris.
And what a great birthday present for Chuck Darwin: a rough draft of the Neanderthal genome. Cool.
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