July 24, 2007 Two spacewalkers aboard the International Space Station added to the list of space junk orbiting the Earth yesterday—but this time it didn’t look human!

Astronaut Clayton Anderson and Cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin floated outside to disconnect a two hundred pound camera stand and a fourteen hundred pound coolant tank from the exterior of the station’s hull. They pitched the hardware out into space. The goal was to push the objects into their own orbits so they wouldn’t smack back into the station. NASA expects the two pieces of space junk to circle the globe for about a year until they burn up in the atmosphere.

"Mr. Smith" met a similar fate early last year.

The Space Station crew had a worn out Russian-made Orlan spacesuit they didn’t need anymore. Mission control decided to turn the suit into an experiment for ham radio enthusiasts. It was called "suitsat". The empty spacesuit was stuffed with radio gear and batteries designed to transmit pre-recorded messages to people on the ground. In what looked like a scene from a cheap sci-fi thriller, spacewalker Valery Tokarev pushed the empty suit away from the station, looking like a doomed crewmate cast adrift in orbit. "Goodbye, Mr. Smith!" Tokarev said as the human-like form drifted away.

Fun aside, space junk remains a concern for both space shuttle crews and the occupants of the International Space Station. Thousands of bits of junk, ranging from nuts and bolts to spent booster rockets from previous space shots, are still circling the Earth. The oldest example of surviving space junk is reportedly the U.S. satellite Vanguard 1. It was launched in 1958 and, by all accounts, is still circling the globe.