From his office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Nicholas Johnson oversees the space agency’s efforts to track the current status of orbital debris and predict the future. That work has attracted far more attention both nationally and internationally since January 2007, when China destroyed one of its own satellites during testing of an anti-satellite (A-Sat) weapon, and the February 2009 collision between a working Iridium telecommunications satellite and the retired Russian Cosmos 2251 spacecraft.

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Debra Werner is a correspondent for SpaceNews based in San Francisco. Debra earned a bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree in Journalism from Northwestern University. She is a recipient...