• Debris from a Chinese Long March rocket came within sniffing distance of the International Space Station this week.
• The ISS was forced to execute evasive manoeuvres as if it hadn’t the debris would have passed as close as 600m from the space station.
• The incident didn’t prevent NASA from conducting the fifth all-female spacewalk aboard the ISS.

On Wednesday evening the International Space Station was forced to make evasive manoeuvres as a large piece of space debris passed close-by.

The debris reportedly comes from a Chinese Long March rocket that launched two decades ago in 2005. To avoid the debris, the ISS had to fire orbital boosters to put some distance between it and the space junk.

NASA reports that the orbital laboratory had to fire its Progress 91 thrusters for 3 minutes 33 seconds to raise its orbit in order to avoid the debris. The space agency says that had it not fired the thrusters, the debris would have passed within 600m of the space station.

Despite the threat of the debris, the space agency said that, “There is no impact to operations aboard the space station and it will not affect U.S. spacewalk 93 on Thursday, May 1, with NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers.”

The spacewalk went off without a problem. Both McClain and Ayers spent 5 hours 44 minutes in the vastness of space will little more than tethers keeping them attached to the orbital laboratory. While this was the 275th spacewalk conducted aboard the ISS, it is only the fifth in which women were the exclusive participants.

“McClain and Ayers completed their primary objectives, including relocating a space station communications antenna and the initial mounting bracket installation steps for an IROSA that will arrive on a future SpaceX commercial resupply services mission. Additionally, the astronaut pair completed a pair of get ahead tasks, including installing a jumper cable to provide power from the P6 truss to the International Space Station’s Russian segment and another to remove bolts from a micrometeoroid cover,” NASA reports.

While the ISS is equipped to get out of the way of debris heading its way, it may have to start doing that more often than usual. In April the ESA revealed that we have now reached a point where even if we stop launching stuff into space completely, the amount of debris surrounding our planet will still continue to rise. This as debris slams into other objects, destroying them and creating more debris. Eventually, we’ll just have a layer of junk orbiting the Earth making future rocket launches far more difficult.

The time has come to start cleaning up space but how we do that exactly is a matter of debate. There are some ideas but they are costly and as you might imagine, the people in charge would rather spend that money elsewhere than cleaning up space.