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‘Space junk’ – including defunct satellites, rocket fragments and even a spatula that escaped the clutches of the astronaut Piers Sellers – has been an inescapable byproduct of space exploration, with only a few negative consequences so far. But with some 200 million objects bigger than a millimetre in size orbiting the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour, every astronaut knows that they are, in Sellers’s words, ‘playing the odds’. Featuring interviews, archival footage and an inventive bit of narration from one of the most notable pieces of space junk, Cath Le Couteur’s whimsical short film Adrift puts the mounting, cosmic problem of space debris in perspective.
Director: Cath Le Couteur
Website: Project Adrift
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Nature and landscape
California’s landscapes provide endless inspiration for a woodcut printmaker
10 minutes
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Love and friendship
Never marry a man you love too much, and other views on romance in Sierra Leone
5 minutes
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Engineering
Can monumental ‘ice stupas’ help remote Himalayan villages survive?
15 minutes
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History of technology
Curious singles and tech sceptics – what ‘computer dating’ looked like in 1966
6 minutes
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Cognition and intelligence
A father forgets his child’s name for the first time in this poetic reflection on memory
4 minutes
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Animals and humans
Join seabirds as they migrate, encountering human communities along the way
13 minutes
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Stories and literature
Two variants of a Hindu myth come alive in an animated ode to Indian storytelling
14 minutes
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Technology and the self
The commodified childhood – scenes from two sisters’ lives in the creator economy
14 minutes
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Fairness and equality
There’s a dirty side to clean energy in the metal-rich mountains of South Africa
10 minutes