In past ages, we humans peered upward and outward from our perch on this inconsequential planet and saw what we imagined to be – except for our neighbors in the solar system and the more distant visible stars – a dark and silent void.
It was a fine poetic conceit, but modern astronomy has proved it altogether wrong. The void was not a void at all.
Debris from the very earliest time of our galaxy's formation – objects as great as named comets, and meteors ranging in heft from hundreds of thousands of tons down to the size of pebbles – careen in uncountable numbers through what used to be thought the vast emptiness of space.
The ones seen incandescing as they plunge into Earth's atmosphere have sometimes been regarded as omens of good luck. You know the lyrics of the Perry Como song: "Catch a falling star an' put it in your pocket …"
They're seldom caught, though. Most just pass on by unobserved.
All this any reasonably informed person knows today. Our species has walked on the moon, has sent robotic explorers to more distant bodies and has plans to follow with manned missions.
What we did not know, and what seems hardly to have been much considered at the outset, was that a byproduct of our adventures beyond that "last frontier" would be a debris field capable of damaging or destroying later spacecraft.
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