Sunday, June 14, 2009
Lottie Williams shows of the piece of space junk that hit her in 1997 (photo: Tulsa World)
Humankind has been warned of all kinds of apocalyptic dangers raining down from the skies, from nuclear weapons to earth-colliding asteroids. But there’s a growing kind of threat looming high overhead, one that is threatening to severely disrupt modern technological society and ground the ability to travel into outer space: Junk.
After fifty years of space exploration, earth’s orbit is smothered in space junk—600,000 pieces in fact, ranging in size from tiny flecks of paint to broken satellites. But regardless of its size, all forms of space junk pose a danger to spacecraft moving through orbit, due to the speed of objects hurtling around the planet. A tiny paint chip traveling hundreds of miles an hour can have the same impact as a bullet fired at close range, and metal the size of tennis balls can be just as destructive as an entire crate of dynamite.
The mass of space junk is only getting bigger, and could reach as many as three million pieces within the next ten years, as more nations launch rockets and satellites, and the debris collides with itself, creating even more of it. There’s so much of it now that the odds are growing of some junk falling to earth and hitting aircraft in the sky, which almost happened in March 2007 with a passenger plane flying over the South Pacific. On January 22, 1997, Lottie Williams of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was hit on the shoulder by a 6-inch piece of metal mesh from a re-entering Delta II rocket while she was walking laps in a park with friends. She was not injured. The rocket had been launched nine months earlier.
But the greater threat is to satellites orbiting the earth. In February, the United States lost a commercial satellite when it was struck by an inoperable Russian satellite. Scientists now worry that such collisions could grow more likely in the near future, causing the loss of important communications and weather satellites. It’s even possible that the junk could grow so thick that launching new spacecraft could become impossible. Dr. Marshall Kaplan at John Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory warned the London Independent of a “coming catastrophic disaster. If we don’t clean up this mess in the next 20 years, we’re going to lose our access to space.”
So far, none of the 20 nations with access to space have agreed on protocols for slowing down the accumulation of space debris.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
The Strange Problem of Space Junk - And How It Threatens Our Way of Life (by Johann Hari, London Independent)
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