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Here in our no win, no fee compensation firm, we deal with a lot of road traffic accidents involving car crashes and motorbike injury , and so on; today's news about the pair of satellites colliding in space seems to put our terrestrial concerns in perspective.
Or does it? Yes, on the one hand, that's a crash that involves vehicles moving at over 15,000 miles per hour; on the other, it's one that hasn't caused any personal injury to the vehicle's occupants, as they were unmanned satellites. A low-velocity car accident that leaves a driver unable to work thanks to a whiplash neck injury might be said to be more humanly important, right?
But we should also think about the aftermath. Just as in a serious road traffic accident, bits of the vehicles may be scattered on the road, and may even cause further smashes as cars try to dodge hubcaps or puncture tyres on an errant sharp bit, the debris from these colliding satellites has caused worries that further orbiting vehicles may be threatened.
Most of the metal up there is uninhabited too, of course, but the example of the International Space Station shows that is not uniformly true. A Chinese scientist told Xinhua that the scattered bits and pieces of the satellites could circle the Earth at speeds of approximately five miles per second, and could do so for decades. Spacecraft could then be punctured or worse, he warned, by the speeding particles.
If the ISS were to be damaged, this could then result in personal injury to the orbiting scientists on board - although we aren't sure that this could lead to a viable compensation claim. Fortunately, NASA believes there is a low risk of the ISS being struck by one of these troublesome chunks, as their orbits are far enough apart.
In 2008, however, the ISS had to be manoeuvred out of the way of other debris, so the threat is still out there. The fact that there is a system to track the orbiting debris is reassuring, but the collision has created yet more debris to track - which, as a New Scientist article has pointed out, may threaten astronautical holiday injury as space vacations come closer to being possible.
Until that happens, though, it's still clear that there are far more possibilities for car accidents than space crashes; there are also far more road traffic accidents occurring than colliding satellites. This is, apparently, the first such crash in the 50-year history of artificial satellites; statistics show that it would be an incredibly good time for the UK's roads if there were only one car crash in 50 days.
This means, of course, that our no win, no fee firm can do more good trying to help people hurt in road traffic accidents than in space collisions, no matter how spectacular that smash above Siberia was.
