Big Brothers Satellites orbiting Earth

As data visualization has become more popular, bad infographics have started to crop up more and more frequently. Thankfully, we can always rely on Michael Paukner to make very, very good ones. Here he shows the satellites orbiting our planet.

Russia, as you might expect, has a whole lot of satellites that are no longer functioning. China is responsible for a surprisingly large amount of tiny space trash, though I'm not exactly clear on what that is. America, of course, is responsible for the largest amount of space trash.

Seeing how many broken satellites remain in orbit instantly reminded me of the scene in Wall-E in which the Earth of the future is seen enveloped in a layer of orbiting techno-trash. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

Michael Paukner has a lot of other awesome stuff, space-related and otherwise, so check out his Flickr if you're interested. [Michael Paukner via We Love Dataviz]