Five-inch debris chunk causes space station evacuation.

Three astronauts from the International Space Station spent 10 minutes Thursday hunkered down inside a Russian Soyuz space capsule as a five-inch piece of space junk hurtled perilously close to the station. Traveling at an estimated 20,000 miles per hour, the piece of debris could have caused a fatal loss of pressure had it hit the space station. One NASA official said it was the closest call he could remember in more than 15 years of tracking debris. This article appeared in The Baltimore Sun Newspaper.
Is it just now dawning on NASA that with more than 18,000 pieces of space junk orbiting this planet that one of these objects could collide with the space station? With that amount of space junk in orbit from launches over the past 29 years is why Ozone Depletion is at a record high 16.5 million square miles, Global Warming continues to grow and Climatic Weather Disasters continue to escalate. NASA, The Russian Space Agency, The European Space Agency and the other 43 countries Space Agencies that are averaging a launch every 2.7 days MUST STOP launching useless satellites into orbit. When will it stop? When debris hits the space station, possibly destroying it or killing astronauts, or the debris falling to earth and killing innocent humans? Satellites and space explorations are not worth the destruction of this planet and its inhabitants.