airspacemag.com A spacewalk in Earth orbit-any spacewalk-requires working in a deadly vacuum for six hours in a stiff spacesuit. It's an exhausting physical and mental challenge, and that's if everything goes well.

In early October, a dead Soviet satellite and the abandoned upper stage of a Chinese rocket narrowly avoided a collision in low Earth orbit. If the objects had crashed, the impact would have blown them to bits and created thousands of new pieces of dangerous space debris.