This is hilarious:
http://news.yahoo.com/clean-space-junk-risk-real-life-gravity-disaster-105445423.html
Tears running down my face at this.
George Zamka, a former NASA astronaut and the current deputy associate administrator in the Office of Commercial Space Transportation at the FAA recalled his own harrowing experiences with orbital debris during space shuttle missions.
"During my two spaceflights, we flew upside down and backwards to prevent our space shuttle windows from being hit by debris strikes," Zamka said.
Not only have NASA space shuttles and the International Space Station had to dodge space junk over time, but two major events have added considerably to the debris problem in orbit.
Question: who steers the big space station to avoid debris.
But, the FAA does not have the authority to regulate commercial activities in space. That job falls to the FCC for communications satellites, and to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for commercial Earth-watching spacecraft.
As such, determining which agency should manage space traffic will likely pose a considerable challenge, Weeden said. In his testimony, he recommended the government assign the task to an
agency that already has significant
expertise with mitigating space debris, or
create a new federal entity to oversee space surveillance.
But to avoid any
Hollywood-type disasters in space, the government must act soon, he said.
Bruce Willis is on stand-by I've heard.
"The continued expansion in the number of space actors [and the] the type of space activities has created a complex space environment," Weeden said. "It is vitally important for the U.S. government to design an approach to stay abreast of this ongoing change."They are shoving it right in your face and you people can't see them taking the absolute piss out of you.