The vast emptiness of space is filling up with junk - a podcast by Marketplace

Folded among the big-ticket programs in President Joe Biden’s latest budget proposal is a small sliver — $88 million — to study and track space junk. That includes everything from defunct satellites to the debris caused from explosions in space. The president wants the Office of Space Commerce to ramp up its ability to track this stuff in real time. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Moriba Jah, chief scientist and co-founder of the space debris tracking company Privateer. Jah says scientists are currently tracking about 50,000 pieces of space debris, down to the size of a cellphone, and that there’s much, much more out there.

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