After Felix Baumgartner, It’s Time to Take Out the Space Trash

When Felix Baumgartner made his record-setting leap 24 miles up into the stratosphere there were two questions on everyone's mind. One--Was his blood going to boil and his head explode? We learned that this was not in fact the case and as the world breathed a global sigh of relief, I think, deep down, there was a little disappointment in all of us. And Two--What the hell was going to happen to that capsule and balloon he rode up in?

Was his pimped out space ride just going to float in Earth's atmosphere for eternity? Banging into floating debris from decaying Russian spaceships piloted by dogs in the 60s in an stratospheric purgatory? Thankfully the Guardian answered that question:

The team remotely detached the capsule from the balloon, allowing it to fall back to Earth under its own parachute. It hit the ground 55 miles east of Baumgartner's own landing site. The balloon was deflated via a nylon 'destruct line', with the lightweight balloon material – known as the envelope – falling back to Earth to be gathered and removed by truck.

It's nice to see they put some forethought into how to get that thing down. Because did you know that while there are 450 active satellites in orbit, there is already over 7,000 pieces of space debris floating around up there since Sputnik was launched in 1957?

That includes pieces of rockets, satellites that didn't have enough power to be retrieved to burn up in the atmosphere and loads of other junk and metal scrap. Sometimes this junk flies into each other, causing damage, which isn't a problem for the junk, but could be a problem for a manned ship flying through that landfill cloud that's basically big floating New Jersey Turnpike.

Which is why the Swiss, of all people, have come up with the Janitor Satellite, 'a mini satellite fitted with jellyfish-likek tentacles that can clear some of the huge amount of debris orbiting above our heads.' A prototype is hoped to be launched into the skies in 2016.

If this janitor satellite is even half as inspirational as the janitor from Rudy then I think the air above our heads is about to get a lot cleaner real fast. And also finally play a down in the 4th quarter.