There is, you might think, an awful lot of space and not much junk floating around in it. There's lots of room for the debris so why worry?
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For lots of reasons, according to Professor Moriba Jah who is in Canberra for a conference of space experts.
He is one of the world-leaders in aerospace engineering and on the management committee of the Space Environment Research Centre at the Mount Stromlo Observatory, and he feels strongly about the 25,000 plus bits of discarded bits and pieces hurtling round the earth.
He says that this flotsam of the Space Age is an underestimated danger which poses a risk to the satellites and space craft on which we depend for navigation and communication.
He told The Canberra Times that it was material which had either been discarded by the nations pushing into space since the Soviet Union sent Sputnik into orbit in 1957 or machinery which had simply stopped working and been abandoned. It was, he said, as though we drove a car and when it broke down just got out and and got in a new one, the old car abandoned.
The space junk big enough to be monitored ranges from about the size of a golf ball up to that of a bus.
Smaller stuff was also dangerous but untrackable - like random bullets flying around.
Professor Jah of the University of Texas said Australia was well placed to help in this tidying-up project because its scientists and facilities were of the highest order.
"There is a lot of debris orbiting Earth", he said. "And if we don't do anything about it, we will see an increase in collisions to the detriment of space operations, space commerce and space exploration."
The plan is for the Mount Stromlo observatory just outside Canberra to pin-point debris. Since the stuff moves ten times faster than a bullet, mathematicians then have to compute paths so satellite operators can be warned that something damaging may be heading their way.
If collision seems unavoidable, lasers could nudge the space junk out of harm's way.
Professor Jah had an unusual route to eminence in his scientific field. At the age of six, he moved from California to Venezuela with his parents.
He found it hard in his new land. "I was a foreigner and learning a new language", he said. "There were different cartoons, different customs, different everything. It’s not easy for a kid".
As he grew up, he wanted to join the military.
As a US citizen, the Venezuelan military was barred to him and his mother barred him from the US marines, so he went into the Air Force.
He ended up as a security policeman on a base in Montana and in his spare time started studying, first law and then science.
His teachers recognised his deep intelligence and he prospered, leading him to job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, analysing tracking data on specific satellites for Mars missions and predicting their trajectories.
And so to his current interest in space debris at the University of Texas where he leads a research program called the Advanced Sciences and Technology Research In Astronautics.
And to the academic forum in Australia this week. His mission is to tackle the waste most other humans think doesn't matter.
