Most Supreme Court justices are confirmed by lopsided majorities, but since the 1990s, partisan votes have become more common.
The bottom line: Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed Saturday with the lowest number of yes votes for a justice in the history of the Supreme Court.
This visualization shows the 18,120 objects being tracked in low-Earth orbit by the U.S. military's Joint Space Operations Center — including nearly 13,000 that are classified as space debris.
Why it matters: As space opens up to more nations, companies and possibly nonprofits, concerns are growing about how to track and reduce debris that threatens satellites and spacecraft.
"There's a lot of ambiguity about what is up there and where it will be an hour from now, tomorrow or next week," says Jah, who's building a database in hopes that it will lead to "[global] rules of the road for good behavior" in space.
Two challenges: Jah says the resolution for tracking objects is currently on the order of kilometers, and "most of the things up there aren’t transmitting their information."
The bigger picture: The military's public database "account[s] for only 4% of the objects in space, according to AGI, a company which provides software to commercial and government entities to analyze and track objects," per CNBC.
Notable: 2,842 of the roughly 3,800 objects in low-Earth orbit associated with China are from Fengyun 1-C, a weather satellite launched in 1999. China used it as a target for a missile test in 2007, spewing fragments throughout space.
The details: In low-Earth orbit, the overwhelming majority of objects are pieces of satellites, rocket bodies and boosters, and other human-made objects-turned-debris. And that doesn't include bits and pieces that are too small to track but are still potentially damaging.
What's being done to try to address the issue:
The data: Space-Track.org is a collection of data from the Joint Space Operations Center, which tracks objects orbiting Earth in order to screen for potential collisions.
Go deeper: Business Insider's Dave Mosher writes on the threat posed by space junk.
Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect the most recent debris data (as of Oct. 4, 2018) and to include measures being taken by industry and government to address the issue. It was first published on April 19, 2018.
In the new century, China has joined the U.S. and Russia as a top competitor in the space race. Here's an interactive look at the government, military, commercial and civil satellites each contender has launched.
One big thing: China has eclipsed Russia with 237 satellite launches since 2007, compared to Russia's 122. But the U.S. remains the dominant international leader in space, with 631 launches as of April. That's more than every other country in the world besides China and Russia, combined.
A big player in the U.S. is Planet Labs, an Earth imaging company which alone launched 149 satellites since 2017.
Editor's note: This story was originally published on Jan. 26, 2018, and updated on Oct. 1, 2018, to reflect launches through April 2018.
