Mending fences in space

By Mike Mount, CNN Senior National Security Producer

updated 6:07 AM EDT, Thu October 25, 2012

(CNN) -- The Air Force wants to rebuild a "fence" around Earth to keep out the riffraff.

Sounds like a Hollywood script to counter aliens or asteroids but it's a real program the military wants to update at an estimated cost of $3.5 billion.

Just don't expect any space cowboys digging post holes and wrangling barbed wire in orbit.

The "space fence" is a series of radar signals managed by the Air Force that has long tracked an ever-growing pile of rocket and satellite parts and other man-made fragments from collisions that zoom around Earth's vicinity at thousands of miles per hour.

The military tracks about 20,000 pieces of so-called "space junk" but the actual size of the problem is ten times larger than that. Pieces that need tracking are as small as a softball to as large as a bus.

Regardless of size, the debris is a danger to manned space flight, such as the International Space Station, and unmanned operations, like the hundreds of satellites circling the planet at any one time.

Those satellites bring in television, run GPS and carry cell service, so the everyday and commercial stakes of managing the problem are high. The military also operates communications and other satellites.

The space station crew has been forced to take shelter in escape capsules because of the possibility of being hit by orbital debris on three occasions. The last incident was in March when a piece of debris from a Russian satellite passed close by.

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Mending fences in space