" 'My worry is that that debris field is going to be up there for a while,' said General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former head of the military's space operations.

" 'So we're going to have to play a little bit of dodgeball for many tens of years to come,' he said.

" 'The good news is once it stabilizes, it's relatively predictable,' he told a forum on the national security implications of operations in space. 'The bad news is it's a large area.'

"A telecommunications satellite owned by Iridium Satellite LLC and a defunct Russian military communications satellite were destroyed about 485 miles above the Russian Arctic on Tuesday.

"Cartwright, who from 2004 to 2007 headed the Pentagon's Strategic Command responsible for space operations, said the military had been alerted by Iridium to the sudden "non-reporting" of the destroyed craft.

"Nations have been operating under a "Big Sky" theory, said Richard DalBello, a vice president at Intellsat, Ltd, which calls itself the world's largest provider of fixed satellite services.

" 'This idea, now overtaken, was that space is so vast that the odds of a collision were "infinitesimal,' he said in an interview. 

Just like the Bushites had no viable exit plan for Iraq since they assumed the US would be there forever, and nations ignored the dangers of nuclear waste, climate change or finite water sources for too long, so to the global community and private corporations flinging satellites and leaving other debris in space didn't count on the negative consequences so soon.

Are the global community's "space officials" seriously addressing the increased traffic congestion in space?