More than 130 million pieces of space junk – from old rockets to exploded payloads – zoom around Earth at over 7 kilometers per second. A single paint chip coming from the other direction can punch a hole in a spacecraft’s hull or an astronaut’s suit. For decades, engineers have used the same old solution: a metal barrier born in the 1940s. Now a small company in Georgia is rewriting the rules with something deceptively simple – a tile, called Space Armor, that sticks on like a giant Post-it, yet stops disasters before they happen.
