Having watched an episode of 70's scifi 'classic' UFO. My interest was piqued as too how much space debris there actually is. In the episode the aliens were using debris of an old space craft to hide a stealth UFO type thing that made moonbase spacecraft crash. Straker was at loggerheads with some higher ranker to have it all removed. They had a picture of what must have been the main/larger peices of space debris and it's orbit path.
Anyway here's a statistic
and another
from Orbital Overload: Space Debris Crowds the Not-So-Friendly Skies.
OK ... so how is it going to change form or reunite with the earth from whence it came???
Anyway here's a statistic
There were 9,233 objects large enough to be tracked and catalogued by the USSTRATCOM Space Surveillance Network. Of this total there were 2,927 payloads, along with 6,306 object classed as rocket bodies and debris.
and another
A 1999 study estimated there are some 4 million pounds of space junk in low-Earth orbit, just one part of a celestial sea of roughly 110,000 objects larger than 1 centimeter -- each big enough to damage a satellite or space-based telescope.
Some of the objects, baseball-sized and bigger, could threaten the lives of astronauts in a space shuttle or the International Space Station. As an example of the hazard, a tiny speck of paint from a satellite once dug a pit in a space shuttle window nearly a quarter-inch wide.
from Orbital Overload: Space Debris Crowds the Not-So-Friendly Skies.
OK ... so how is it going to change form or reunite with the earth from whence it came???