BY KIM BELLARD

Gosh, so much going on.  Elizabeth Holmes was finally sentenced.   FTX collapsed.  Big Tech is laying off workers at unprecedented rates, except TikTok, which should, indeed, be cautionary.  Elon Musk’s master plan for Twitter remains opaque to most of us. Americans remain contentedly unworried about the looming COVID wave. 

With all that to choose from, I want to talk about space debris.  More specifically, finding opportunity in it, and in other “waste.”  As the old saying goes, one person’s trash is another person’s treasure, so one person’s problems are another person’s opportunities.  

And, yes, there are lessons for healthcare.

Getting to space has been one of humankind’s big accomplishments. We’re so good at it that earth’s orbit has become a “graveyard” for space debris – dead or dying satellites, pieces of rockets, things ejected from spaceships, and so on.  Space is pretty big, but the near-Earth debris is getting to the point when avoiding it becomes an issue for the International Space Station and other orbiting objects.  

Scientists now fear that climate change will impact the upper atmosphere in ways that will cause space debris to burn up in it less often, making the problem worse.