A piece of space junk hurtling through the void narrowly missed hitting and depressurizing the $100 billion International Space Station, forcing station crew members to take brief shelter in a Russian Soyuz space vehicle.
The space junk, a piece of a satellite motor, was zooming at orbital speed (17,500 miles an hour, plus intersecting velocity added to that) toward the station.
The space junk trajectory was irregular, so even though trackers estimated it would miss the station, NASA ordered a precautionary evacuation of its crew members into the Soyuz, which is kept docked to the station as a sort of life raft.
If the five-inch object had hit the station, it could have punctured a wall and caused depressurization, with air in the station rushing through the hole into outer space, a deadly threat.
In the eight minutes or so that station crew members had the Soyuz hatches closed, they were poised to separate the Soyuz from the space station if it were hit by the object.
The threat posed by space junk is rising ominously, greatly worsened by China using a ground-based missile to demolish one of its own aging weather satellites. That anti- satellite shot, creating thousands of pieces of deadly space debris, was roundly condemned by other nations as an irresponsible act endangering spacecraft ranging from the station and space shuttle to satellites.
Too, an Iridium Satellites LLC bird recently was demolished when a defunct Russian satellite crashed into it, creating hundreds of pieces of debris.
Some experts fear that each successive collision in space will create more debris, which will smash into more satellites, in turn creating yet more debris in a vicious cycle of destruction.