Space Security 2007
"It focused on the United States's "small and controversial program for space-based ballistic missile defense and proto-technologies that may form the basis for future space-based weapons," and Earth-based weapons programs. "There is growing tension between the US and China over the security of outer space, largely driven by mistrust and suspicions over weapons programs," said co-author Ray Williamson of Secure World Foundation in the news release.
The report said China's test "created 1500 pieces of trackable debris in heavily used orbits - one of the worst manmade debris-creating events in history - but debris caused by routine space operations is also a problem."
"Even a small piece of metal, traveling at 7.5 kilometers per second, can destroy a spacecraft worth billions of dollars," said William Marshall of the NASA Ames Research Center, an advisor to the space index.
"The number of objects in Earth orbit have increased steadily; today there are an estimated 35 million pieces of space debris," said the report, noting that 90 per cent of 13,000 orbiting objects large enough to damage or destroy a spacecraft are space debris."
see
http://abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/09/15/2033843.htm
