July 14 2008 / by jcchan
Category: Space Year: Beyond Rating: 7 Hot
Ah, space tourism. You ditched
Paris or Tokyo to the dismay of your spouse and now sit some 600
miles above Earth with an ice-cold Mojito in hand. “See, honey?
This isn’t so bad.” As you take a sip the pilot speaks over the
intercom about some turbulence. That’s fine you think, it can’t be
bad as the bumpy airplane trips to Los Angeles back when you were a
kid. 
Just then, you see gold specks scream pass the window at 17,500
miles an hour, followed by the loud thud of a space helmet that
leaves a considerable dent in your window outside. The entire
space-plane trembles violently as red lights flood on. The pilot
reassures that it was just space turbulence and to strap on seat
belts. “This wasn’t mentioned in the catalogue” you thought, your
spouse giving you a look that you know all too well.
This may not be the common vision of space tourism but the
reality is that since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik back in
1958 there is an estimated one million pieces of junk floating in
orbit. Of those, 9,000 objects are bigger than a tennis ball, large
enough to cause catastrophic damage to moving space shuttles,
satellites, and space stations. Most are pieces from old satellites
and garbage left behind by previous missions. Adding to this mess
are nuts, bolts, and screwdrivers that have errantly drifted into
space from missions, and an expensive Hasselblad camera with exposed
pictures still inside.
According to the European
Space Agency, of the 5,500 tons of material in orbit, 93% is
junk that includes parts of old spacecraft, depleted rocket
boosters, garbage bags ,and even nuclear coolant. Each piece can
and are dividing into more pieces. Only 7% of the material in orbit
is operational spacecraft in use.
Besides posing an ethical problem of using our orbit as a
landfill, the junk pose a big problem to current and future
missions because of their ultra-high velocities in orbit. At 17,500
miles per hour, a millimeter speck of paint has the same amount of
energy as a .22 caliber long rifle bullet, a pea sized piece has
the lethal potential of a 400-lb safe traveling at 60 mph, and a
tennis ball sized piece of metal is essentially 25 sticks of
floating dynamite.
So what can we do about this junk? Is there a way to get it out
of orbit? Perhaps zap it? Or give it a nudge? (cont.)
No economical method exists now to clean up this 50-year
junkyard, but scientists have begun proposing possible solutions to
counter this growing problem.
- A materials scientist from the School of Mechanical
Engineering at Tel Aviv University is developing Nano-Based
Blanket to protect spacecraft and nanoscale ‘cages’ containing
silicon that can react with oxygen to prevent polymer
degradation.
-A
robot garbage collector that shifts orbit by throwing around a
weighted tether and attaches ‘Terminator’ tethers to space garbage.
The Terminator tethers will then push the junk into the atmosphere
where it will burn up.
-A
ray gun, shooting lasers at pieces of space junk so they will
shift and burn up in the atmosphere
-A half-mile wide
NERF ball that would disrupt space
debris and cause them to lose energy and altitude. The only problem
is how to keep it away from functional satellites.
Space is so vast and infinite that who ever would have thought
all our junk would come back to haunt us 50 years later. But with
emerging nations like China joining the Space Race, perhaps it’s
time to take space dumping just a bit more seriously.
Then again, garbage is a great way to learn about civilizations
as we have seen in our history. Perhaps a day will come when a
space-faring race will stop by and find Earth a odd lump floating
in a sea of junk.
“Where have all the garbage makers gone?” one of them would ask.
We would have already made our mark on the universe.
Image courtesy of the European Space Agency
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