The photo above is an artist's rendition of space debris collecting and colliding around a planet.

(European Space Agency)

Thousands of pieces of debris that have the power tohit and break a space shuttle window orbit ourplanet. These broken bitsof old satellites are a problem, and scientists say this issue will only continue to get worse.

, where they can potentially crash into each other, the Washington Post reported. The debris is moving at roughly 25,000 mph, so when they smash into one another, they explode into even more pieces of debris.

Soon, 12,000 new space capsules are expected to be sent up by companies, and many of them are small, motorless nano-satellites, according to the Post. These tiny spacecraft travel farther than their larger counterparts and are more likely to careen into one another since they can’t navigate.

Since the Space Age began in 1957, , according to the European Space Agency. About 4,300 of these remain in space but only 1,200 are still functioning. About 23,000 debris objects are regularly tracked by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network.

An official with the European Space Agency described a recent study in which scientistsfound a crowded region of the galaxy which has already become unstable due to the swarm of debris, according to the Post.

During the recent European Conference on Space Debris, University of Southampton aerospace researcher Hugh Lewis announced he and his team of researchers . The results show the odds of space collision more than doubled with the small spacecraft involved.

For now, there is nosolution for cleaning up the space junk.

Experts at the conference said voluntary guidelines to mitigate some of the debris, such as taking the inoperable satellite out of orbit within 25 years, have typically been ignored.

“International treaties and national legislation need to ,” space law specialist Christopher Newman toldNew Scientist. “Legislators need to act to counter this growing threat to the space environment.”