What happens when you’re hit by something going 15,000 miles per hour? Total obliteration, more or less.

That’s a very real scenario that spacecraft engineers must keep in mind every time they put something in space. Collisions with objects in orbit are rare, but they do happen. In the past, paint chips have left craters in the space shuttle and a French satellite was disabled in 1996 after its gravity-gradient boom was severed by a chunk from an exploded rocket.
Shields Up!
To protect