As commercial space activity ramps up, detritus from launches poses a risk to active satellites and those of us down on Earth

Last month, people in a small village in Kenya looked to the sky and saw a red glowing ring slowly descending. The half-tonne piece of metal crashed into a nearby thicket with a loud bang, leaving them shaken and perplexed. What was the mysterious object? Was it an alien spacecraft? Sadly, the truth of the matter was much more prosaic: it was a piece of space junk.

The Kenya Space Agency identified the object as a separation ring from a launch rocket. Such objects are usually designed to burn up as they re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere or to fall over unpopulated areas, leading the agency to declare this as “an isolated case”.