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Even 'N Sync's Lance Bass almost went up but lost his funding at the last minute, I'm guessing because his sponsors were actually making a hyperbolic joke about "launching all boy bands into orbit" and backed out when they realized they were being taken literally.

There aren't enough tourists going up to ruin everything, yet -- but that's OK because corporations and space agencies are way ahead of them. In the years since Sputnik went up, we've been putting more and more crap in orbit -- discarded rocket stages, defunct satellites, loose parts -- and not bringing any of it back, because, how would you do that, seriously. It takes like two hours to pick something up with the space shuttle arm.

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People have been warning for years that sooner or later, crap is going to start running into other crap, and it happened in 2009 when a phone company satellite crashed into an old Russian communications satellite. It's worth noting here that space is big. But not big enough to keep all the trash we've been shooting up there without it turning into junk bumper cars.

And it's not just NASA and Soviet stuff up there -- your Sirius radio, your satellite TV, weather forecasts and any kind of GPS device, all depend on satellites. It's getting damn crowded. And it's easy to forget that China's getting into space now, a country notorious for giving less than half a shit about the environment, which explains why 31 percent of tracked space trash already belongs to them.