Can you imagine all of that floating space junk someday becoming a threat decades after it ends up in space?

Just earlier today (Dec. 3) at around 3 a.m. EST (0800 GMT), The International Space Station dodged a decades-old rocket body from a fragment of a Pegasus rocket. According to a statement from America’s NASA program, this debris was created in 1996 from the object 39915, which was the upper stage of a Pegasus rocket that had launched two years prior to it breaking up.

NASA had been notified to delay a spacewalk and forced to schedule for later due to the concerns of the floating fragments on Tuesday (Nov. 30).

That debris came from a Russian anti-satellite test conducted on one of its own defunct satellites; fragments from the incident might threaten astronauts on the station for years to come.

All seven astronauts currently living and working on the space station faced a still more serious space junk scare just a few weeks ago. On Nov. 15, the crew was forced to shelter in the two passenger spacecraft currently docked to the space station during two close passes with orbital debris.