21st century probs

There’s a roughly 1 in 10 chance that a falling piece of rocket debris will kill someone over the next decade, according to a new peer-reviewed study published in Nature Astronomy.

📚 Background: Rockets generally use various stages to get their payloads to space, parts of which get left in orbit. Most of the leftover debris burns up in the atmosphere, but potentially lethal pieces can still come hurtling back towards the ground.

🚀💥 Heads up, seven six-to-ten-percent up… After crunching 30 years of public records to calculate the possible risk of rocket debris to human life, the study’s researchers found there’s a 6–10% chance of at least one person dying before 2032.

• As far as locations go, people in the global South (i.e., Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania) face the greatest risk. This is due to most launches taking place closer to the equator.

📸 The big picture: Rocket launches have steadily increased in recent years, with 134 successful launches happening in 2021 alone – the most ever in a single year.