Space may be an unfathomably vast area of complete nothingness but the part of it nearest to Earth is getting really rather cluttered.
A dramatic increase in satellite launches over the past five years, together with rising volumes of space debris, means the chance of collisions is rising fast, risking damage to consumer services such as weather forecasting, online banking and Google maps.
The specialist insurer Hiscox, which provides insurance for satellites, says the risk of a collision in each year of orbit in the most crowded area — about 500 miles above the Earth — has risen from one in a million a generation ago to one in 1,000 today.
Pascal Lecointe, a space underwriter at Hiscox, said: “Just a few decades ago, when
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