New Chinese Travel Law Hits Korea's Tourism Industry | ASIA TODAY News & Events

Significantly fewer Chinese tourists are visiting Korea since a new travel law took effect in China this month, leaving travel and retail businesses here that counted on a continuing boom high and dry.

Korea's biggest travel agency Hana Tour on Thursday said the number of Chinese tourists it handled shrank to 4,000 in October, down 60 percent from 10,000 last month.

Mode Tour said its tours attracted 13,000 Chinese last month, but that fell to 5,000 in October. The numbers include all bookings until the end of this month.

"The decline is mainly due to the new Chinese travel law," said a Mode Tour staffer.

The new travel law bans including shopping in tour programs, charging extra, and demanding tips. It aims to prevent travel agencies from attracting customers with cut-price tours that sometimes fall short of even the round-trip airfare, and then trying to make the money back from tips, optional extras and herding them into certain shopping outlets that pay commissions.

That sent the average cost of a package tour to Korea up 30 to 40 percent.

"As most group tours to Korea were cut-price packages, it seems they suffered directly from the new travel law. Demand for travel to Europe or the U.S. has stayed about the same," said a Korean resident in Shanghai.

Although a lot of Chinese tourists came here during China's national holiday week, which ended Oct. 7, the number for the month is now less than half that of September.

"There have been almost no Chinese customers since the national holiday," said a travel agent. "It feels even more serious because we had so many Chinese customers until September."

Department stores and duty-free shops are worried since booming sales to Chinese tourists had made up a welcome buffer in this recession.

A department store spokesperson said, "Business is expected to suffer a considerable drop if the number of Chinese tourists plummets. We'll have to think of a new promotional strategy."

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Time For Business to Shift Focus to The Long Term | Ian Goldin

Time For Business to Shift Focus to The Long Term

In a week when we have seen the effects of political gridlock writ large in US politics, the report Now for the Long Term feels well-timed in its strong call for leaders in politics, business and civil society to include long-range thinking and planning into the mix. The immediate pressures of today cannot be ignored but neither can the need to create a sustainable future; not least if we want to leave a positive legacy.

The danger of leaving a damaging legacy is real. The growing financial debt, rising carbon emissions, dwindling natural resources and the escalating burden of chronic disease all have the potential to leave unsolvable problems for the next generation if we fail to act on the scientific bases that show clearly the difficulties we are storing up. The Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations has brought together scholars from the University of Oxford with 19 leaders from the world of business, government and civil society, to look at the implications of business as usual and find practical ways to overcome short-termism.

In business it is more difficult than ever to balance the pressures of today with goals for the next decade. Business incentives tend to revolve around swift successes; increasing weight is attached to mark-to-market accounting, quarterly returns and short-term incentive bonuses. Uncertainty in global markets has led many companies and business leaders to seek safety in quick returns on investment. Questions about the role of government and unpredictable behavior, such as was manifest in the recent Washington stand-off, compounds the problem.

It is not that the short-term is unimportant. After all, if firms go bankrupt there is no point in planning for the long term. We forget at our peril that the private sector is the largest source of jobs and that flourishing companies are vital for growth, and are a particularly valuable asset in a world that is still suffering the cascading effects of the 2008 financial crisis. Government employment is contracting, so the private sector must generate the jobs required for economies to recover from the crisis.

Sustainable growth, however, requires that we go beyond the immediacy of quarterly reporting. While short-term measures can be a pointer to sustainable growth, they are not enough. Simply relying on short-term measures of success in business can create longer- term instability and risk.

While the future is full of opportunity arising from the extraordinary advances of recent decades in terms of living standards, life expectancy and economic development, it is also highly uncertain and characterized by a pressure on resources and economic inequality. The rational actions of individuals and firms when aggregated lead to escalating demand for food, water, minerals and energy which, together with the environmental consequences of escalating global consumption, is unsustainable. In order to understand the implications of our current patterns of consumption, we need urgently to reassess the relationship between shareholder and societal value and shift the focus significantly to the long term.

Dominic Barton, the Managing Director of McKinsey & Company, and Mark Wiseman, President and CEO of Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, have both argued that firms are under increasing pressure to be short-term at the cost of longer-term strategic decision-making. Performance metrics based on share prices are used at the expense of long-term value creation. At the same time rewards are skewed to investors who want to make a quick return and who have little concern for a company's long-term prosperity.

Many companies and commentators are pressing for a shift towards the long term. Barton and Wiseman have sought to influence the buy-side by encouraging institutional investors and corporate directors to steer capital towards long-term value creation. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development is helping to galvanise the global business community towards sustainable ends. The B-Team, founded by Sir Richard Branson and Jochen Zeitz, is among the most recent private sector responses to short-termism, calling on businesses to prioritise people and planet alongside profit.

This work is encouraging but too many businesses are failing to show leadership and take responsibility on the scale required. Some global firms have become skilled at transcending national jurisdictions to avoid obligations, be they on the environment or tax. In a globalised commercial world, ensuring compliance requires coordination between countries that often compete for investment. In Now for the Long Term, the report of the Oxford Commission for Future Generations, we call for a move to "revalue the future", which includes a number of ideas for focusing business on the long term. Our proposal for "innovative, open and reinvigorated institutions" fit for this century, not the last, includes a call for a Voluntary World Taxation and Regulatory Exchange. This Exchange will raise pressure on companies to disclose their tax planning and transfer pricing arrangements and on governments to reveal preferential tax rulings.

Collectively, we need to rethink corporate governance so that owners and boards embrace longer-term mindsets and responsibilities to society at large. Above all, we need business leaders to invest their significant ingenuity, creativity and resources on creating long-term value.

Changing course in such ways may seem contrary to the rational choices of individual investors and companies. However, if we do not step up to this challenge, the collective result may be consequences so damaging future generations will wonder how we squandered our truly remarkable opportunities. The consequences of our actions will resonate for generations to come. But the choices are ours, and need to be taken now.

This post is part of a series produced by The Huffington Post and The Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations, in conjunction with the release of the latter's report Now for the Long Term, published by the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford. The report's recommendations aim to break the gridlock that undermines attempts to address the world's biggest challenges; to bridge the gap between knowledge and action; and to redress the balance between short-term political pressures and a need to secure a sustainable, inclusive and resilient future. To see all the posts in the series, click here. For more information on the report, click here.

 

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The Future Of Education Eliminates The Classroom, Because The World Is Your Class | Co.Exist | ideas + impact

The Future Of Education Eliminates The Classroom, Because The World Is Your Class

This probably sounds familiar: You are with a group of friends arguing about some piece of trivia or historical fact. Someone says, "Wait, let me look this up on Wikipedia," and proceeds to read the information out loud to the whole group, thus resolving the argument. Don't dismiss this as a trivial occasion. It represents a learning moment, or more precisely, a microlearning moment, and it foreshadows a much larger transformation--to what I call socialstructed learning.

Socialstructed learning is an aggregation of microlearning experiences drawn from a rich ecology of content and driven not by grades but by social and intrinsic rewards. The microlearning moment may last a few minutes, hours, or days (if you are absorbed in reading something, tinkering with something, or listening to something from which you just can't walk away). Socialstructed learning may be the future, but the foundations of this kind of education lie far in the past. Leading philosophers of education--from Socrates to Plutarch, Rousseau to Dewey--talked about many of these ideals centuries ago. Today, we have a host of tools to make their vision reality.

Socialstructed learning is an aggregation of microlearning experiences driven not by grades but by social rewards.

Think of a simple augmented reality app on your iPhone such as Yelp Monocle. When you point the phone's camera toward a particular location, it displays "points of interest" in that location, such as restaurants, stores, and museums. But this is just the beginning. What if, instead of restaurant and store information, we could access historical, artistic, demographic, environmental, architectural, and other kinds of information embedded in the real world?

This is exactly what a project from USC and UCLA called HyperCities is doing: layering historical information on the actual city terrain. As you walk around with your cell phone, you can point to a site and see what it looked like a century ago, who lived there, what the environment was like. Not interested in architecture, passionate about botany and landscaping instead? The Smithsonian's free iPhone and iPad app, Leafsnap, responds when you take a photo of a tree leaf by instantly searching a growing library of leaf images amassed by the Smithsonian Institution. In seconds, it displays a likely species name along with high-resolution photographs of and information on the tree's flowers, fruit, seeds, and bark. We are turning each pixel of our geography into a live textbook and a live encyclopedia.

We try to fit new technologies into existing social structures in ways that have become familiar to us.

So look beyond MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) in thinking about the future education. In our focus on MOOCs and how they are likely to disrupt existing classrooms and educational institutions, particularly colleges and universities, we are missing the much larger story. Today's obsession with MOOCs is a reminder of the old forecasting paradigm: In the early stages of technology introduction we try to fit new technologies into existing social structures in ways that have become familiar to us.

MOOCs today are our equivalents of early TV, when TV personalities looked and sounded like radio announcers (or often were radio announcers). People are thinking the same way about MOOCs, as replacements of traditional lectures or tutorials, but in online rather than physical settings. In the meantime, a whole slew of forces is driving a much larger transformation, breaking learning (and education overall) out of traditional institutional environments and embedding it in everyday settings and interactions, distributed across a wide set of platforms and tools. They include a rapidly growing and open content commons (Wikipedia is just one example), on-demand expertise and help (from Mac Forums to Fluther, Instructables, and WikiHow), mobile devices and geo-coded information that takes information into the physical world around us and makes it available any place any time, new work and social spaces that are, in fact, evolving as important learning spaces (TechShop, Meetups, hackathons, community labs).

We are moving away from the model in which learning is organized around stable, usually hierarchical institutions (schools, colleges, universities) that, for better and worse, have served as the main gateways to education and social mobility. Replacing that model is a new system in which learning is best conceived of as a flow, where learning resources are not scarce but widely available, opportunities for learning are abundant, and learners increasingly have the ability to autonomously dip into and out of continuous learning flows.

Instead of worrying about how to distribute scarce educational resources, the challenge we need to start grappling with in the era of socialstructed learning is how to attract people to dip into the rapidly growing flow of learning resources and how to do this equitably, in order to create more opportunities for a better life for more people.

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Taiwan's Big Brand Blues

Taiwan's Big Brand Blues | ASIA TODAY News & Events

Acer has suffered huge losses, and HTC has seen NT$900 billion in market value evaporate over the past two years. Why is the branding dream of Taiwan's high-tech sector crumbling?

The winds of autumn have proved to be unsettling for the world's major high-tech brands, portending a new era of maturity in a sector accustomed to robust growth. Leading vendors have felt the pinch, with Apple's growth slowing and Microsoft acquiring Nokia after unsuccessful forays into mobile devices.

Two of Taiwan's most prominent high-tech brands, computer vendor Acer Inc. and smartphone-maker HTC Corp., have also seemingly entered the autumns of their lives after facing setbacks on several different battlefields.

Acer, Taiwan's branding standard-bearer after being founded 37 years ago, has suffered two consecutive years of heavy losses and was still showing few signs of emerging from its slump in the third quarter this year. Rumors are swirling that there could be a change in management or even that the company could be sold.

Sixteen-year-old HTC has lost NT$900 billion in market value in just two years. After hitting a high of NT$1,300 per share in late April 2011, HTC's stock price plummeted to NT$122 on Sept. 9, the lowest since the company went public in March 2002. Though the stock has rebounded in recent weeks, closing at NT$140 on Sept. 24, many believe the company faces a precarious future.

It will likely post a loss in the third quarter, and it is forecast to ship about 20 million smartphones this year, barely half of the total when the company was at its peak in 2011. It could be soon overtaken by upstart Chinese smartphone brand Xiaomi, which was launched just over three years ago.

Adding insult to injury, new product designs were recently stolen and sold by company insiders.

Even HTC's chairwoman acknowledges problems exist while trying to sound upbeat.

"I think smartphones are still in their infancy, and there are still plenty of opportunities, such as smart cities. There are inevitably ups and downs when building a brand," says HTC chairwoman Cher Wang, as confident as ever. "I need to get better. The CEO also has to get better."

So what exactly has happened to Taiwan's high-tech brands? Why has the country's high-tech sector, helped by tax breaks from the government, with access to the best talent and global markets, come out battered and bruised every time it has pursued its branding dream?

Could it be that only powerful and prosperous countries are able to spawn strong high-tech brands?

"From Acer and AsusTek to HTC, everyone is up against the same fundamental challenge," laments one brand entrepreneur in private.

Without a big home market, Taiwanese high-tech companies are naturally at a disadvantage in the crucial area of defining standards, such as source code for operating systems and basic communications patents. Taiwan is also not interested in adopting the Korean model of pouring the entire country's resources into forging one big brand.

"A small country has to concentrate its resources. To some extent, it has to put up with the spirit of capitalism," says Chiu Yi-chia, the chairman of National Chengchi University's Graduate Institute of Technology, Innovation & Intellectual Property Management. Taiwan's high-tech policies, Chiu says, put a premium on fairness and diversity and amount to a sheep (socialism) in a wolf's clothing (capitalism). As a consequence, Taiwanese tech brands, inherently disadvantaged from the outset, are pushed further off-balance as they take on the global market of 7 billion people.

Acer and HTC represent the leading companies of two different generations. Acer's battleground is the previous-generation notebook computer market of about 200 million units a year; HTC competes in the recently skyrocketing smartphone market of about 1 billion units a year. HTC has been building a brand for five years, Acer for nearly 40 years.

Yet the two vendors have suffered the similar fate of highly volatile corporate profits, and in fighting for market share, both have encountered the same two double-edged swords.

Double-edged Sword No. 1: An International Team

Over time, the two brands have seen major fluctuations in their earnings, but HTC's have been more dramatic than Acer's.

"HTC faces a market that is five times bigger than Acer's, but the time it's had to build a brand has been compressed to 1/6th the time Acer had, putting it under intense pressure. So HTC's sudden rises and falls are really not surprising," explains a high-tech entrepreneur. In today's tech wars, more resources are being brought to the fight than ever before, with a huge amount being burned in the money pit known as "brand marketing."

"It's hard for Taiwanese brands to survive. Samsung sells smartphones as if it were selling shampoo. It even trains it salespeople based on methods used by Proctor & Gamble and Tesco," says a former manager for Samsung in Taiwan. The manager explained that the Korean electronics giant treats tech brands as fast-moving consumer goods brands, pouring huge sums into marketing. It invests three times as much as HTC in sales support in Taiwan, and salespeople at any authorized retailer get a NT$500 bonus for every Samsung smartphone they sell.

Talent is another area where a major financial investment is necessary.

"If you want to fight a global battle, you need international talent," Acer chairman J.T. Wang once said. Acer has shown the willingness to offer internationally competitive salaries to hunt for talent around the world.

"Taiwan does not have a national image or market development advantages to sell, so Taiwanese companies must rely on salaries above the norm to hire top international talent," observes Bei Lien-ti, a professor in National Chengchi University's Department of Business Administration.

Yet Acer's practice of paying top salaries for both local and international talent have not translated to improving results.

Top executives, including Walter Deppeler, the former chairman of the marketing committee and now a senior corporate vice president, Steve Lin, the president of Asia Pacific operations, and Oliver Ahrens, Acer's president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, are all paid salaries of between NT$50 million and NT$100 million a year, more than Acer corporate president Jim Wong. But that has not stopped the company's global PC market share from falling to 8.3 percent in the second quarter of 2013 from 13 percent in the second quarter of 2010.

"They're paid high salaries, but there are no signs that the company is turning things around," complains one disgruntled Acer insider, who says that since former Acer CEO Gianfranco Lanci left the company in 2011 with a hefty severance package, Acer no longer has the financial wherewithal to hire such top-flight international execs.

As for HTC, it boldly bought a stake in American headphone brand Beats in a deal negotiated by former chief operating officer Matthew Costello, only to have to sell its stake to stop the bleeding from its investment.

The company also paid US$45 million for streaming video service provider Saffron Digital in early 2011, a deal brokered by chief strategy officer Ronald Louks. Louks left the company not long after, and HTC sold Saffron this year for US$47 million. The smartphone maker never did get the synergies from Beats or Saffron Digital it had hoped for.

"Can we really call using a bunch of foreign executives to make a bunch of cross-border acquisitions internationalization?" asked a resentful former HTC manager.

So why are Taiwanese tech companies so unable to work together with an international operations team over the long haul?

"Because Taiwanese do not have boards of directors with strong functions and sound operations," says National Chengchi University's Chiu, noting that the management of Taiwanese tech brands generally depends too much on an all-powerful CEO.

In contrast, in the United States, IBM's board was able to enlist Louis Gerstner to help revive the company, and Yahoo's board recruited Marissa Mayer to do the same at Yahoo.

"Only if the board mechanism is sound can the company build the strength of its management step by step," Chiu says.

Another key to brand marketing is finding an appropriate price point based on the product's positioning in the market. But because HTC's customers have been telecom operators and Acer's customers have been distributors, neither has been able to get a firm grasp of the end user, making it more challenging for them to develop insight into consumers' needs.

Double-edged Sword No. 2: Technological Prowess

HTC relied on its edge in technology, including producing the first Android smartphone, to become the preferred supplier of telecom operators around the world. But after riding its technology to the heights of the industry, HTC neglected the rapid shift in the smartphone market to mid-range and low-cost models.

As the smartphone market exploded over the past five years, HTC failed to see that the main competitive emphasis was evolving from functions to price.

"With Apple now resorting to highlighting the functions of its phones' CPU specs, you know that there is no longer much differentiation between products. You can't count on the brand alone to determine success or failure," says the chairman of an electronics contractor with annual sales of about NT$100 billion.

HTC's high prices have resulted in a backlash from telecom operators. "When all you're doing is assembling screens and CPUs made by others, what business do you have charging a high price? HTC needs to reposition itself. Its main competitors should not be Samsung or Apple but rather Sony, LG and Huawei," the president of a telecom company says bluntly.

Being able to reposition a company at any time is a necessary survival skill in today's brand wars, as Acer has also learned because of its limitations in product flexibility.

Acer relied on a single product category (personal computers) and an individual's strong control of a distribution channel (Lanci in Europe) to thrive, but as the market shifted to mobile devices and Lanci departed (leaving massive inventory in Europe), the secrets of its past success have turned into the catalysts of failure.

Also, determined to build up market share, Acer acquired the Gateway and eMachines computer brands in the United States in late 2007 and Dutch computer maker Packard Bell in early 2008, but those acquisitions have turned into heavy burdens (eMachines no longer exists). The declining value of its sub-brands forced the company to take an "intangible asset" impairment charge of NT$3.5 billion in early 2013, a development that has seriously weakened Acer.

How Small Countries Can Outwit Rivals

Over the past 40 years, Taiwanese tech brands have yet to develop management capabilities across borders, across different fields and across product lines. "Using the same management system to handle different markets and different products only leads to trouble," says Chu Po-young, a professor in the Department of Management Science at National Chiao Tung University.

So does that mean that companies from only the world's biggest economies – the United States and China – can fight the battles for scale and platforms in today's global high-tech wars?

"Small countries can still outwit bigger rivals, as long as they understand how to focus," says Liu Shuen-zen, a professor in National Taiwan University's College of Management. Taiwan can open a new battlefield and cultivate B2B brands, he suggests, pointing to the Swiss model as one worth emulating.

"Switzerland emphasizes 'precision and focus.' Through its sharp concentration and technical proficiency, Switzerland commands 80 percent of the global market for ink used on bank notes, and its watches generate high margins," says Liu, who believes Taiwan could also become a global "hidden champion" in several niche markets.

Following an arduous journey will not be without reward. Though equipment manufacturer ASML is the last company standing in the Dutch semiconductor sector, the world's semiconductor vendors cannot do without its lithography system, and its gross margin last year was 42 percent.

England's attempt to create its own Silicon Valley may have failed, but Cambridge gave birth to ARM Holdings, which developed the architecture on which most of the processors used in smartphones around the world are based. The company may be relatively small, but by leveraging its strength, it has been able to deal powerhouse Intel a severe blow.

Acer and HTC are both likely to post losses for the third quarter, and their short-term prospects remain uncertain. But considered over the longer term, the hard road traveled by Taiwan's high-tech brands remains worth pursuing. After all, success is built on the pillars of failure.

Translated from the Chinese by Luke Sabatier

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China now world's 3rd largest investor

China now world's 3rd largest investor | ASIA TODAY News & Events

Even as global outward foreign direct investment contracted last year, China set records in this area, becoming the world's third-largest investor, a government report said on Monday.

China's outbound FDI rose 17.6 per cent year-on-year in 2012 to a record high of US$87.8 billion, according to the 2012 Statistical Bulletin of China's Outward Foreign Direct Investment, which was released by the Ministry of Commerce, the National Bureau of Statistics and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange.

The report was released during the 17th China International Fair for Investment and Trade, held in Xiamen, Fujian province, which began on Sunday and closes on Wednesday.

Global ODI slid 17 per cent last year, amid uncertainties confronting the world economy.

China's increase made the nation the world's third-largest investor last year after the United States and Japan, for the first time since the country began to release the data a decade ago.

China was the world's sixth-largest investor in 2011, with an outward FDI flow of $74.65 billion, according to last year's report.

"The Chinese government introduced measures to encourage outbound direct investment in pursuit of the 'going abroad' strategy, and the country's outward FDI maintained robust growth in recent years," said Zhou Zhencheng, commercial counselor of the department of outward investment and economic cooperation of the Ministry of Commerce.

Huo Jianguo, president of the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation, a think tank of the ministry, said that the surge in outward FDI was mainly driven by domestic enterprises eager to tap overseas markets and profit from using global resources.

"Debt crises and slowing growth in developed economies opened up great opportunities for Chinese enterprises to invest abroad, and the renminbi's appreciation helped the process," Huo said.

The nation's non-financial ODI went up 13.3 per cent last year to $77.73 billion, accounting for 88.5 per cent of the total.

Financial ODI surged 65.9 per cent to $10.07 billion, according to the bulletin.

Flows to the US jumped 123.5 per cent to $4.05 billion, making the nation the second-largest destination for China's ODI.

Total ODI to developed economies, at about $13.51 billion, was virtually flat year-on-year at $13.42 billion, according to the bulletin.

Hong Kong received 58.4 per cent — $51.24 billion — of the mainland's ODI.

The city, with its well-developed services in finance, accounting and consulting, serves as a gateway for domestic enterprises to explore international markets, according to Victoria Tang, associate director-general of Invest Hong Kong, a body under the special administrative region's government charged with promoting investment.

Outward FDI to the British Virgin Islands and Cayman Islands, where Chinese investors set up businesses to bypass investment restrictions in developed economies, slid 72.5 per cent to $3.07 billion in 2012.

Developed economies where growth has been weak since the 2008 financial crisis have welcomed ODI from China, which has huge foreign-exchange reserves and cash-rich enterprises, Zhou said.

"The fast increase of China's outward FDI also showed that the country's manufacturing is significantly gaining international competitiveness.

"Further, the country is eager to establish transnational cooperation through mergers and acquisitions in international markets," Huo added.

In 2012, Chinese enterprises completed 457 outward M&A transactions valued at $43.4 billion. Those were record highs for both numbers and value.

These M&As covered 10 sectors, including mining, electricity, culture, manufacturing and transportation.

China's ODI grew 41.6 per cent annually between 2002 and 2012. The government has set a goal of increasing ODI at an average annual rate of 17 per cent through 2015, when it is forecast to reach $150 billion.

The full-year figure this year "is likely to see China's outward investment grow more than 15 per cent", Zhou said.

He added that the robust growth will be maintained in the near future, in view of the country's economic restructuring and the move by its industries to shed excess capital and invest their cash.

As of the end of 2012, China's total outstanding ODI was $531.94 billion, the 13th-largest in the world, said the report.

The amount was small compared with the US outward FDI stock of $5.19 trillion and the United Kingdom's $1.8 trillion, the report said, because "China's outbound direct investment took off rather late".

Chinese investors have established about 22,000 overseas enterprises in 179 countries and regions, "and about 79.2 per cent of them made profits or maintained a balance", Zhou said.

He added that Chinese enterprises are facing rising risks and challenges, including political unrest in Africa and Southeast Asia.

Other challenges include increasing competition from developed economies and restrictions in those markets.

by Li Jiabao

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Incredible Technology: How to Clean Up Dangerous Space Junk

The vast amount of manmade debris in orbit around Earth is untenable, but emerging and currently available technologies could be used to get these objects under control.

Humanity is generating space junk more quickly than the debris can fall back toward Earth naturally, putting satellites and spacecraft at risk of colliding with speeding pieces of debris. Unless something is done, the problem could get worse, said Donald Kessler, retired head of NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office.

"In the long term, everything will eventually break up due to collisions," Kessler told SPACE.com. "Even if you don't add anything else to the environment, the collision frequency due to random collisions will create more debris than will re-enter naturally." [The Worst Space Debris Events of All Time]

At the moment, NASA officials estimate that about 500,000 pieces of debris larger than a marble orbit the planet. There are 22,000 bits of junk as big as a softball, and there could be more than 100 million tiny fragments at least 1 millimeter across racing around Earth.

But how can mission controllers on the ground remove those troublesome pieces of space junk  — including defunct satellites, spent rocket stages and other pieces of manmade debris — from their dangerous orbits?

The "old-fashioned" method

Technology readily available today could mitigate the space junk threat, Kessler said. By taking only five satellites out of orbit each year for the next 100 years, while adhering to an international understanding called the 25-year rule, space agencies could stabilize the orbital environment, according to a NASA study. The 25-year rule stipulates that nations should not launch objects whose lifetime in space will exceed 25 years after the completion of their missions.

Space agencies could also rely on a somewhat basic method to remove the debris, Kessler said. Engineers would need to develop some kind of technology to grapple the target piece of debris and pull it into a part of space where it could quickly to burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

"Technologically speaking, the easiest way to do it is what I've been referring to as the old-fashioned way," Kessler said. "You just design a spacecraft to go up and get it, attach a rocket to it and send it on its way or wherever you want to put it."

On the horizon

There are other, more high-tech options on the horizon for space cleanup as well.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA)  Phoenix spacecraft project would use old, but functioning pieces of defunct satellites to create new space-based systems — instead of adding completely new satellites. Officials working with the program would launch a "tender" vehicle that would make use of small "satlets" launched without an expensive antenna needed to make satellites function.

Once in space, the tender would move a relatively inexpensive satlet to a defunct geosynchronous satellite. There, the old satellite's antenna could be recycled and incorporated into the tiny satellite, effectively creating a new communications system without necessarily producing more space junk.

Scientists could also use lasers to mitigate the risks posed by orbital debris.

"There are two ways that a laser works" to get rid of a piece of space debris, Kessler said. "One is using what they call photon power — just letting light waves slow it down until it re-enters [Earth's atmosphere], but that works really well on small stuff.

"To get a big force out of it, you need to vaporize part of the surface and essentially form a jet … but when you're doing that, you don't know what might happen, so there's some uncertainty there," Kessler added. "You would hate to cause it to blow up for example." [Photos: Space Debris Images & Clean Up]

Space junk-targeting lasers probably won't be built anytime soon, however, because the national security implications of such a tool could make it a non-starter, Kessler said. That is, the possibility of weaponizing a powerful space or ground-based laser could make building such a device politically difficult.

Another mission — expected to launch to space in 2015 or 2016 — will aim to rendezvous with and grapple obsolete satellites. CleanSpace One, a project of the Swiss Space Center, is designed to be the first satellite capable of grappling a piece of space junk in orbit and plunging with it into Earth's atmosphere, disintegrating both spacecraft.

Space junk in fiction

In trailers for the film "Gravity," opening Oct. 4, a huge cloud of debris can be seen hurtling through space, destroying or damaging a space shuttle, the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope.

While the movie depicts an extreme example of a space junk catastrophe, the scenario is not impossible, Kessler said.

"I suppose all of that is possible, [but] it's not very probable," Kessler said. "The object that broke up could have been in a slightly elliptical orbit because Hubble is higher than the space station, and if it were to break up in an elliptical orbit, it could go through the Hubble altitude and the debris could orbit down to the space station altitude."

And if the space station "happened to be in the right spot, it would go through the same cloud," Kessler said.

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Director of Joe Lie Beauty And Cosmetics

3rd, 3-45, Complex Bukit Jambul, Penang, Malaysia.

Contact : 016-404 3004

                016-521 9853