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Are we losing control of outer space to private interests? More and more companies, primarily Elon Musk's SpaceX, are sending satellites into Earth's outer atmosphere. There are benefits, of course, but also major concerns. These satellites are being built for rapid development and obsolescence, meaning what goes up must come down.
Space debris the size of a large metal cabinet landed in a field in Saskatchewan in 2024. And this is not an isolated incident by far. Satellites also add light and radio wave pollution to our skies. Aaron Boley delivers the 10th Annual Dan McClellan Memorial Lecture in Astronomy at St. Mary's University in Halifax.
We have launched more satellites in the past six years than we had in the previous 60. He's a noted astrophysicist, University of British Columbia professor, and co-author of Who Owns Outer Space, which won the prestigious 2023 Donner Prize. Bolley asks, how can we become better stewards of outer space? To begin, I would like to ask you to imagine a field.
a farmer's field. And as you're imagining that farmer's field, I want you to further imagine farmers going out onto that field, preparing it for seeding for the year. One farmer, as he goes out, finds this mess of metal and composite material and doesn't immediately know what it is.
But then finds out that other farmers in the area, when they were going out to seed, also found some strange-looking components of material. They get it together, they talk with each other, and together they come to the conclusion that they found the remnants of a spacecraft. Now, this might sound like the beginning of some science fiction story, but this happened in Ituna, Saskatchewan.
Those farmers gathered those pieces that had fallen and scattered all over, put it in a barn, and then awaited for SpaceX to come and pick it up. Because this remnant happened to be the fragments of the Crew Dragon trunk. The Crew Dragon being the spacecraft that services the ISS, and the trunk is the cargo portion of that servicing.
Just before the capsule re-enters, it jettisons this trunk and leaves it uncontrolled orbiting Earth. Earth still has a little bit of atmosphere that extends, and objects are orbiting within that atmosphere. And so after time, that drag from that atmosphere brings it down, and it falls uncontrollably in a location on Earth.
As it was entering, it broke apart, and these large pieces of potentially lethal debris were then scattered over the farms of Ituna. SpaceX came, sent two employees who did not talk with anyone there except the farmers to reach a deal. There was some money exchange reportedly about the storage costs of the debris, and then they drove off in a U-Haul.
A dear colleague of mine and friend, Professor Sam Lawler, was in the center of this. She called me up at one point and said, we have to talk. Farmers found debris just outside my home. She has been working with me on dark and quiet skies, both together and independently. And we've also been working on space debris together and independently. And now the space debris is coming to her.
We wrote about this experience in the conversation, which is available for all of you to read. And she's further than had reflections on her direct account. Because when she called me, she was like, I'm going to go take pictures of this. And we're going to talk with the farmers and see what's happening. We weren't sure exactly how the different mechanisms within Canada, as well as internationally, would play out to retrieve the space debris.
is not an isolated incident. Because shortly thereafter, another piece fell in North Carolina near a campsite. And before both Ituna and North Carolina, there's a piece that fell in the outback of Australia and is sticking in the ground there, the size of a truck. Every time SpaceX sends Crew Dragon to the ISS,
you can expect that deadly debris will be falling to Earth. Now, SpaceX is not alone in this. NASA is not alone in this. In fact, it is standard practice to just jettison material, leave things in orbit, and let it fall down where it may. And we can go through and find examples throughout the world. Here's a small selection of those, of where there have been pressure vessels, rings,
that have fallen from rocket bodies and other objects onto the ground uncontrollably. NASA recently authorized the release of an old battery pack from the International Space Station and allowed that to re-enter uncontrollably under the premise that it would simply ablate in the atmosphere, burn up into small particulates. Well, a portion of that...
hit a Floridian's house, went through the roof, went through the ceiling, went through the floor. Someone was home. Luckily, they were not hurt. And it's not just the possibility of a casualty risk or the possibility of property damage. There's also the possibility of economic damage, which has happened. There was an uncontrolled Chinese rocket body that was about to reenter.
Estimates suggested that it could reenter over Spain and France. And so in a last moment effort to protect the aircraft in flight, they closed airspace and rerouted aircraft. And some aircraft were not able to go. What's happening is the belief that space is too big for us to think about our actions.
is now causing economic and possible casualty consequences for those of us on Earth. Returning to Canada, this is not the first time that we've had debris fall over Canadian territory. In 1978, a Soviet spacecraft that was nuclear-powered had a failure.
and re-entered uncontrollably. It broke apart, and it spread radioactive material over northern Canada. Operation Morning Light was then this effort to collect all of the radioactive material, and it was through this process that Canada is the only country so far to invoke the 1972 Liability Convention, as well as other international state practice, for damages,
and for violating Canadian airspace. So there was a settlement that was finally reached in 1981. I wanted to start with this because it is an example of how non-sustainable practices really hit home. But it's only one component of a wide range of issues that we are facing with our very rapid expansion into outer space. We have rocket launches.
that are producing a lot of exhaust and putting it into the upper atmosphere. And it's one of the only mechanisms in which these strange products can be placed into the upper atmosphere. Things such as alumina, as well as large quantities of soot, apart from...
kind of touching the lower stratosphere. These rockets are the only way to really extend all the way throughout the atmosphere for some of these products. Once the satellite is in orbit, of course it is producing services. These are important services. But they also then reflect light, which we can then see, changing the appearance of the night sky, but also potentially damaging then observations. They transmit in order to complete their services. And by transmitting,
They then interfere with radio astronomy. Material that is placed into orbit often produces debris, and there can also be unintended strikes, explosions, meteoroid impacts that also produce debris. Debris on orbit is a major operational hazard for the continued safe use of outer space. In orbit, debris is crisscrossing.
at speeds of about 10 kilometers per second. Those are relative speeds of about 10 kilometers per second, a little bit higher than the orbital speed. If you take a hockey puck and you hit something at 10 kilometers per second, the energy released is equivalent to two kilograms of TNT. You go larger than that, much more TNT. And so you can have catastrophic explosions.
by collisions with small amounts of debris. And finally, when material re-enters, there's the casualty risk that we already talked about, but material also ablates and then deposits that material into the upper atmosphere, changing the chemical composition. Now, I'm going to talk about some hard things here in terms of our changes to the environment, but I want us to also...
realize that satellites are a great benefit to society. And our dependence is growing on satellites in a tremendous way. Whether it is we're looking at forest fire monitoring, weather, climate science, marine traffic, looking at fisheries and making sure no illegal fishery is happening, verification of treaties, banking, navigation, communications, connectivity, farming, search and rescue are just
a short list of how we are becoming more and more dependent on satellites. One, I think, beautiful example of this is something that Canada has taken a role in. And this is the COSPAS-SARSAT system. It's a system of satellites conceived and implemented during the Cold War in Canada, France, the United States, and the USSR. And this is a system of satellites.
that provides search and rescue beacon detection capabilities throughout the world. Thousands of people are rescued throughout the world thanks to this system, and that's been ongoing for decades. This was conceived, implemented, built during the Cold War. And you had adversaries being able to come together to use space in a way to benefit society in a tremendous way.
Now, here's the hard part. With these benefits, there are risks. One of the big issues that we are facing is that the satellite systems are proliferating. We're building these so-called mega constellations of thousands to ten thousands of satellites. And we're having a growing desire as a society to do more and more and more from space. If it can be done from space, let's do it from space.
And not just do it from space, but let's make space systems that are built for rapid development and rapid obsolescence. It is a consumer electronics model applied to space because now you could always have the latest tech on your satellite. You can always have the best equipment on your satellite. And if you have the infrastructure to access outer space reliably, then the cost can be brought down.
Of course, this brings in lots and lots of discarded waste. The basic problem, and this is not unique to outer space, is that we assume the environment is too big for our actions to matter. Whether it is plastic in the oceans, whether it is our emissions changing the atmosphere, changing the ozone layer,
Or whether it is our interactions with outer space, thinking that outer space is just too big. Humanity stands up and says, challenge accepted. So what I'd like you to now do is imagine a curve of growth for satellites. We have the start of the space era, the launch of Sputnik. And then we go on to today.
Now, if we're looking at all the way up to 2018, what we could do is we could say there are the cataloged objects. These are all the satellites that have been launched. And we could just keep adding that up year after year. We can also say at any moment, what is the number of satellites on orbit? And we could also add that up and show that as a growth over year after year.
And then finally we can say, okay, how many objects have re-entered the atmosphere? That gas drag finally caused the satellite to come back to Earth, break apart in the atmosphere. And we can do that, and if we add the re-entry and the re-entered, we get the cataloged. What we can see is that as you get to 2018, the growth has been fairly steady in the amount of satellites that are launched and the amount that stay on orbit.
But after 2018, 2019, there is a sudden change, a rapid change. This is a visualization of the era of new space. What we have is the hockey stick of satellite systems. And where this ends, we do not know yet, but we are seeing tremendous growth. We have launched more satellites in the past six years than we had in the previous 60.
learning how to operate and the consequences of this in real time. And that brings us to space sustainability. And not just space sustainability, but Earth space sustainability. This is where we're using and exploring space in a way that does not prevent others from also using and exploring space. And also doing this in a way...
that accounts for the risk to the Earth-space environment. There are many components of this, and I've listed only a number of these. Dark and quiet skies, casualty risks, emissions, both from launch and re-entry, space security, space debris, and non-appropriation, a concept that you can't put so many satellites in different areas of space that it prevents others from also using space.
For a little bit here, I want to just focus on the dark and quiet skies component. If you go to a dark enough spot, you will see a sky full of stars. You can see nebula. You can see other galaxies. You could even see the Milky Way, our galaxy, our home projected onto the sky.
Milky Way growing up because I had lost it. I was surrounded by light pollution. So the first time I was able to see the Milky Way is when I went somewhere. I had to go somewhere to a truly dark place. And then I was able to see it and it was stunning to me. Absolutely amazing. You have, yes, constellations that we all know and stories and history that's built into the constellations. But if you go to a dark enough place, the light from the Milky Way,
is so bright that you can see light being blocked by dust. And you can now see the dark constellations that cultures have known for millennia. Now, maybe some of you have been able to see the Milky Way. Maybe some of you haven't. But we are facing this problem of terrestrial light pollution, which is removing our view of the night sky.
And that loss of the night sky means that we're not seeing the changes that are happening due to the orbital changes. We do not see the orbital light pollution. Instead, it's masked. It's masked by the terrestrial light pollution. But luckily, even with this light pollution, you can go to a dark place and escape it.
And maybe some of you could go to Kejamakujic, and you could look at the dark sky there. And maybe you could see the Milky Way there. But when you go there, it will be different. It will be different because now you will have satellites in the sky. Now, it is, as we will discuss, a difficult problem.
The satellites will become global by design, and so you can't go to any place to escape them. It's also going to be the case that depending on your latitude and the time of year, you will see different amounts of satellites in the sky even though that they are there. We'll talk about that a little bit more. But before we do that, let's get a picture in our minds of what the satellites look like.
We have about 13,000 satellites, somewhere 13,000 to 14,000 satellites, depending on how you count them, in orbit. Only 11,000 of them are working, and more than half of them are owned by a single company. There are also 2,200 abandoned rocket bodies in orbit. These are large objects that are left and just are tumbling. And at some point...
They'll come back down. What we can do is we could take a snapshot of all those satellites and all of those rocket bodies. And with that snapshot, we can project them onto the globe to get an idea of where they are relative to us. And in that projection, there are a couple things you'll see. You'll see the far geo belt. This is this belt of material far away that's used to build things like geosynchronous orbits.
You'll also see then these bands that start to form at various latitudes. One of them is close to 50 degrees and goes right across Canada. These are concentrations of satellites that result from the orbital dynamics. When you build a satellite system, you build your satellites with different inclinations. The inclination is just the relative alignment, the tilt.
of the orbit of the satellite relative to Earth's equator. When you have an inclination then, the satellite follows this tilted orbit, and it will reach a peak of latitude that's comparable to the inclination of the orbit itself. So if you have an inclination of 50 degrees, then you'll have satellites that will traverse their projection onto Earth between 50 degrees north,
and 50 degrees south. And you'll have a little bit of extra time spent where it turns over. What we can now do is take this picture that we have, and we can ask, what do the satellites look like at any location in the sky? And so, for example, we could take a look at the satellites in the sky in Halifax on November 28th at 7 p.m.
And this is just a snapshot of what's there. And you'll see that here, close to overhead, there is a number of satellites. You'll see a band that wraps through the sky that represents the geosynchronous satellites. And you'll also see that at any moment, there are a lot of satellites in the sky. That is by design. The satellite systems are to leave no place unturned on Earth. That's their mission.
Now, if you go out now to look at those satellites, just with the way the timing is set and our time of year, most of them will be in shadow or they will be too dim to really see. The satellites will be very visible an hour or two after sunset and before sunrise. But right in the middle of the night, they'll be harder to see.
just with the way the sun is shining light on them and the way Earth is tilted and the way the orbits are built. But if you go to summer, now you can see satellites at most Canadian latitudes where you have darkness all night long. And of course, it's not just changes to the night sky that are problematic. There are changes then to research potential.
and other areas. So in a widely circulated image recently on the internet, you can find this picture of a comet. And this picture of a comet was taken over 20 minutes of exposure time. And it has a fairly wide field, meaning it can see a lot. In that 20 minutes time, it had dozens of satellite streaks that went across it.
And those dozens of satellite streaks are representing just a snapshot of what's being proposed to go into orbit. Now, for those who do things like astrophotography and so forth, you can say, well, we can just throw out the streaks because we can take a lot of images and we could throw out all the bad ones and still get a really good image. And that's true. You can do that. But you're throwing things out. Now you're starting to throw away data. And even if you're able to do that,
say in amateur astronomy, or if you're doing that in astrophotography, doing that at a major facility, where millions of dollars have been spent just to operate it, there is a serious cost to just throwing out data. It takes more time to do the observations, which means there's less science that can be done, and fewer scientists who can participate in the science itself.
which means there are fewer ideas that go around. And so while we can mitigate this, there is a real cost to the science as a result. Sometimes you'll hear, let's put the telescopes in orbit. Well, yes, you can do that, but you will not escape light pollution from orbit. So if you take images using HST,
satellite streaks right now. And we are going to see that increase with other space telescopes as we increase the number of satellites in orbit. At the moment, this is manageable. Whether it's manageable after 10 times the number of satellites we have, that remains to be seen. And it's not just the satellites, but all that debris we're talking about. That debris creates a dust cloud.
that enshrouds the Earth. You can see debris streams around Earth. And if you look at the small bits of debris, there are over 130 million pieces inferred that are a millimeter size or larger. What that means is that with this dust cloud the Earth is now encased in, it is scattering light. And that scattering light is raising the overall brightness of the dark sky.
And estimates are that right now with the dust that we have around Earth, it's about a 10% hit. So we have skies that are 10% brighter than what they were. And this is from just the dust. You're listening to astrophysicist Aaron Boley on the consequences of private interests in outer space.
on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, on World Radio Paris, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also hear ideas on the CBC News app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Tanya Mosley didn't even know she had a sister until she went missing.
Her sister, Anita, left home in 1987 and never returned. Now Tonya, along with the help of her sister's son, Antonio, is determined to find out what happened. I'm Kathleen Goldtar, and this week on Crime Story, one woman's search for her long-lost sister. Find Crime Story wherever you get your podcasts.
Let's return to Aaron Boley delivering the 10th annual McClellan Lecture on Astronomy. At the end of his talk, there will be a question and answer period, moderated by Ideas producer Mary Link. Now, we haven't talked about radio astronomy at all. Now, radio astronomy is a critical way that we explore the universe. It's essential for detecting certain objects. We can't just use optical UV infrared.
One of the ways to ensure that you could do your radio astronomy is to go to a remote location on Earth, away from terrestrial interference, analogous to getting away from the light pollution we just talked about. But if you put your emitters in orbit, if you now put everything in orbit, the pollution source in orbit, you can't go to an isolated site in order to escape it. The threats to radio astronomy and the threats to...
optical astronomy and the night sky become now connected with direct-to-cell. Direct-to-satellite cellular service is something that's being developed and will be tremendous in some of the benefits that it could bring. The idea is to ensure that no matter where you are, there are no cellular dead zones if you have access, if you can afford it, so on and so forth.
The consequence of doing this, these are satellites that are 64 square meters in area. They are as bright as the brightest stars, and they are very loud radio-wise. And so these are going to cause a very serious issue going forward. It has benefits, but it comes with serious risks. And just as a reminder of where we're going with the number of satellites, if you go ahead and take that same idea, that same picture where we've projected...
a snapshot of all the satellites onto Earth. And we take just the 11,000 working satellites that exist right now, and we say there are more like 65,000 satellites that are working. And you just use what's being proposed. We have a world blanketed in satellites that have very strong bands at certain latitudes, and Canada is going to be one of them. Now, dark and quiet skies is just one component of this greater...
Earth-space sustainability challenge. We already saw casualty risks, saw dark and quiet skies. But one that actually concerns me personally the most is neither of those, although they are connected. What concerns me the most is the change to the upper atmosphere. So I've had many conversations with various people in industry and government and so forth, and we say,
You know, the satellite reentries are going to change the upper atmosphere. They're going to say, no way. Comes back to that first bond. There's no way that we can change the upper atmosphere just from our use of satellites. I said, okay, well, let's look at the numbers. We can go ahead and just assume there are 30,000 satellites. Yes, more than there are today, but far fewer than what's being proposed. They're each about one ton each.
If you have a five-year replacement cycle, which is how these mega constellations are being designed, then that means with 30,000 satellites, one ton each, you have six kilotons of satellites disposed per year, 16 tons of satellites per day being disposed in the upper atmosphere. And you want to make sure that it ablates entirely so that you don't have a casualty risk. It's actually called design for demise.
So that's what we're doing with satellites or where we're going. So people say, well, what about the meteoroids? Yes, let's talk about the meteoroids. Meteoroids are actually the natural set of objects that are coming in and depositing material in the upper atmosphere, also through ablation, burning up. If you remove the really...
long-term events that carry in a lot of mass, but are very long-term, very rare. There are about 33 tons of meteoroid material that's coming in every single day. So 16 tons is smaller than 33 tons, but it's comparable in number. However, the compositions are entirely different. Meteoroids is rocky material.
is largely oxygen. And then it has a bunch of trace elements and metals. The satellites are largely things like aluminum plus other stuff. And so the differences there are huge. And as a result, we're already...
placing significant quantities of aluminum in the atmosphere. And if we continue on the trajectory we're going, we're going to be having orders of magnitude more aluminum than what happens naturally. And with the lithium that's used in the aluminum alloys and the lithium that's used in the batteries, we're having hundreds of times more lithium being produced in the upper atmosphere. All of this changes the metal layers of the upper atmosphere, and it also can change
are aerosols and this is not just some theoretical finding last year or two years ago an aircraft went up and collected aerosols from the stratosphere as is regularly done but we started making a lot of noise about the possibility of the atmospheric pollution and so they took a very close look for deviations from
meteoroid material. And what they found is that 10% of the aerosols, which they were collecting for examination in the stratosphere, had unmistakable signatures of satellites. Weird metals that you just do not find in the meteoroids. Niobium, for example. There were high quantities of lithium. There were high quantities of aluminum compared with what you would expect. So we're already changing the upper atmosphere's aerosols.
And we're not even close to being done. Now, will it matter? I don't know. And a lot of us don't know. That's the problem. It's changing faster than what we're able to understand. But when you change the aerosols by changing the chemical composition, you could be changing their optical properties. And this is one of the areas that's now becoming an area of research. And if you change their optical properties, then you're changing...
Earth's climate system because the aerosols are a really important part for its climate system. If you're dumping alumina into the upper atmosphere as well, that can create its own set of particulates that then have ozone-depleting reactions. And so we have the possibility of changing the climate and also changing our ozone abundance. There are more things that we could go into with this.
But for the sake of time, I will continue. But the point is that we are measuring this already. We don't know what it's going to do. It is an uncontrolled experiment because we want to access space, which is critical to do. It is a hard problem. There are four treaties, I really should say five, but there are four treaties that are central to international law.
is applied to outer space, and that's what I mean by space law. So we have the Outer Space Treaty, we have the Rescue Agreement, the Liability Convention, and the Registration Convention. And all three of those are simply expanding upon articles within the Outer Space Treaty. There's also the Moon Agreement. We could have an entire discussion on just the Moon Agreement, so I'm going to set that aside for now. One of the things that...
Outer Space Treaty does, it also clarifies that international law and the UN Charter apply to space. So you have that extension of international law to space, you have space law as a subset of international law. And one of the things that's very interesting about it, and this is true in many instances of international law, states are responsible. So we have principles, and it's up to the states.
to enact those principles. So space law has many components that are vague yet binding. And it's actually, in my opinion, very important for it to be that way because it allows then states nationally to make laws and adapt as the circumstances change. Of course, that vagueness can be exploited.
And it could push back the change to timescales that are untenable sometimes. But the principles are really amazing. I mean, there's this principle of due regard and non-interference. There's the non-appropriation principle. The Outer Space Treaty and space law is also arms control. It's really amazing. Very strong arms control. It has a complete prohibition on nuclear weapons.
and weapons of mass destruction placed in orbit or on celestial bodies. And it also makes the moon and celestial bodies for peaceful uses only. It also makes the exploration used for the benefit of all humankind. Now, once again, there is a lot of vagueness in this, but it's still binding, and it's up to the states to react and adapt as we move forward, which sometimes I'm not so good at doing.
There are other initiatives that I won't get into at the moment, but I will say that of all the agencies, the European Space Agency is taking a tremendous leadership role in the Earth space system and addressing many of these concerns. Earth orbits are a shared resource, and we need to be asking some tough questions. We need to be asking, when someone proposes a satellite, how many satellites do you need?
A lot of companies will say, well, it's our business model. We don't need to tell you. And with the way things are set up right now, that's true. But we need to be forcing that conversation to say, no, no, no, no, no. You can't indiscriminately place satellites in orbit and occupy them. We have to understand that there truly is a need for this. Because if we're building outer space in a way that benefits us very short term,
but ruins our long-term prospects, then we've not done ourselves any favors. Okay, questions. When you said that half are owned by one business, would Elon Musk be? That's SpaceX, yes, that's right. So they have about 6,000 satellites or so. So I'm curious, though, so who does, I understand the idea of international law, but who does regulate it? Who says, Elon, you can't put any more up?
Does anybody say that to him? There are a couple different, well, no one says that to him directly. The FCC has said, hold on. So they have had statements to say, you have to show coordination with astronomy. You can't put up all the satellites that you're proposing, but we'll let you put up 7,000. And who's the FCC? Sorry, that's the Federal Communications Commission.
And that's in the United States. So that's in the United States. So what happens is that we have international rules and regulations, but they are ultimately then enforced through national rules, regulations, and licensing. So you have to coordinate through, for example, the International Telecommunications Union if your satellite is going to communicate. But it's the national agencies that ultimately do the licensing, and the ITU acts as a facilitator for this.
Now, states are obligated to meet, then, if they're members of the ITU, which all those operating space are, then they have to still abide by these regulations. But it's ultimately the national mechanisms that are the enforcement mechanisms. How come he is able, in his business, to have swiped away half of the business? It seems a bit disconcerting that one man would have that kind of...
Well, what's happened is it's not so much that he's taken half of the business as it is there was a certain amount of satellites that were there, and he had a way of putting more satellites up than anyone else and just did that and did it faster than what people could really catch up with what was happening. And so there are multiple components of this that are actually complicated, but...
The FAA in the United States, Federal Aviation Administration, the FCC for launching, the FCC for the licensing of the radio communications. Things were just happening so fast that their regulation didn't, at first...
really pick up with what was happening. Does it worry you that one person owns so many satellites? Oh, absolutely. The way things are being changed in the environment with the Earth-space environment are now dependent on one company in one state as kind of the first instance. Where we're going, as more and more states occupy outer space in similar ways, then we're going to see that change.
But this movement of just blanketing Earth with satellites is now being replicated because there are now security concerns. There's the not being left behind in any technological race. So all of this is now prompting other states to do similar type of actions. The images you show, and we'll put them on the website.
They're pretty big. Some of these metal pieces that have fallen from the orbit back onto Earth are like the size of a truck of metal. That could kill somebody. I'm surprised it hasn't yet around the world. Yeah. So far, we do not know of anyone being killed by debris. Our estimates, we've done some and other groups have done some. We've independently come up with there's about a few percent chance each year of somebody dying right now, and that's growing.
That is tied to this concept of we need to have a controlled reentry regime where you aren't allowed to just leave stuff in orbit to come down whenever it pleases. That you have to spend extra money, you have to have extra technological development to do things like have reignitable upper stages for your rockets that can then send them...
into remote places, the Earth such as Point Nemo, a location in the ocean that's far from land. Well, why in Saskatchewan? Is that just because it was large tracts of farmland that you were able to see it? Is it all around the world, these pieces of metal? Oh yeah, these pieces fall wherever they fall. And so what you could think about is a satellite is going around in its orbit, but in terms of latitude, it's going up, turning around, coming down, turning around, going up, and coming down. And that turnaround point takes extra time.
And so there's a concentration of satellites at those turnaround points. And so these are just areas where we might expect more debris to fall. And we're in one of those bands. Over Saskatchewan. It's all around the world. And this one just happened to be in Saskatchewan. You talked about...
The moon and other celestial beings are the benefit for all mankind. Right. Something along that lines. There's this constant chatter about who's going to make it to Mars and we're going to have people living on Mars. And one can only envision that this is going to create problems because humans tend to like to fight over things. Yes. What do you, do you have concerns about things like in particular the talk of Mars? Yeah, absolutely. For Mars, although my concerns are not necessarily people fighting kind of.
directly with other groups yet, because it's just so hard to get there to establish a colony on Mars. So many uncertainties and so many problems for the long term and safe.
use of that space. The people who are going there probably are having a one-way ticket, at least initially. And so there will be some degree of strife within the groups themselves, but there won't be enough groups necessarily to have that interplay. Fast forward long enough, absolutely, there will be these type of issues. And this is, it's the exact same thing that we're facing on the moon now. So we are having different states.
show their space exploration abilities by going to the moon, having companies go to the moon. And what we're seeing is the emergence of two programs. You have the Artemis program, which Canada is part of, and then you also have the Russian-Chinese partnership, which also has its own members that are going to go and establish then research laboratories either in orbit about the moon or on the moon.
Sorry, one more question. In Kendrick Kujic, you were talking about the National Park in Nova Scotia. It's one of the places where you can go without light pollution. You can look up at the stars. But if I go there...
There will be light pollution. There will be satellite. You will see satellites. You will see satellites. And the number of satellites you see depends on what time you go or what time you're viewing, as well as what time of year. And what would you see if you were looking in the sky that would indicate it's a satellite? It's just going to be fast moving across the sky, and it's not going to be blinking like an airplane. Although...
I have seen tumbling rocket bodies, and that is trippy. Because you see this thing going across the sky that's not an airplane, but going blip, blip, blip, blip. What did I just see? So you can see this debris that's doing that. But for the most part, if it's a satellite, it's just going to...
go across the sky. It's going to have a relatively smooth brightness, although it will vary with time. And it's going to be moving approximately about a degree per second. So I will see, no matter what, when I look up at the sky in Kejimakujka, I will see that? You will almost certainly see a satellite if you let your eyes adjust and you watch it long enough. And the number that you see will depend on the time that you're observing and also the time of year.
My question, do you think that the rise of rapidly reusable launch vehicles such as SpaceX's Falcon 9 is at least partially responsible for the dramatic increase in cataloged objects in orbit? And either way, do you think these innovations in reusability have a net positive or negative impact on space debris and the Earth-space environment? So it's hard for me to take away the reusability rockets and the fact that it's SpaceX.
lots of satellites because it wants Starlink. And because of that, it's launching lots. And it's using these reusable rockets, which is great, in my opinion, for multiple reasons. One of them, it does help us at least think about...
how we're treating the impacts. Another one is the reusability of it is really pushing us toward thinking about how we can prevent having debris in orbit. So the booster phase is re-landed and reused. The upper stage is not always de-orbited from orbit, although they often do. But in terms of the number of satellites, I think that's just directly SpaceX, and it's hard for me to separate.
that from the innovation of reusable rockets. But overall, I think reusable rockets are part of the solution. They're not the whole solution. Great to see you. The quick question for me is, have we made a mistake? Have we got a semantic problem in part of this? To me, that's not outer space. To me, outer space is a lot further away than what we're talking about right now. And there is a lot of room in outer space. Maybe we should call it upper atmosphere, but maybe it's too late.
Totally reasonable question and has also caused massive deforestation through lawyers writing about where's the boundary of outer space.
So the United States takes it to be about 80 kilometers. Most of the world takes it to be 100 kilometers, but it's not really set. But it's arbitrary, ultimately. You can find people have worked out lots of reasoning behind their arbitrary decision, but it's arbitrary. But to your point, yes, the space that we're talking about in terms of Earth orbits is actually quite small. And we are talking about largely Earth orbits, and we're largely talking about up to 2,000 kilometers above Earth's surface, which is not very far.
at all. But is it semantics or is that the problem in itself? I'm not sure if that's the case. It's a reasonable question to ask. Ultimately, yes, the ISS is orbiting in the thermosphere, but no one really questions whether the ISS is in outer space. Hi, my name is Liam. I'm a fourth-year astrophysics student here. And I was wondering about, does this relate to us eventually being trapped with our own debris field around the planet?
So, you know, brings images of WALL-E and that movie, if you're familiar with it. So it increases the risks of all operations on orbit. It doesn't necessarily trap us.
While the numbers I showed are very high and the orbits are going very fast and you do occupy a huge space and the collision risk is also very large, a one pass through is still quite possible and will be quite possible even with that congested environment. So it won't trap us in that sense. But kind of what do we mean by that trap? I think of Douglas Adams with your question and the planet cricket.
Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Some of you do. Okay, so there is a planet Cricket, and it was in a nebula, so they could not see the surrounding stars and galaxies, and it completely changed the way they viewed themselves within the cosmos. They viewed themselves as totally alone and did not contemplate the possibility that there could be others.
And then when the spacecraft landed there, they got all upset, had an interplanetary war, and the game of cricket is a perversion of that war. Anyway, read the book. It's... But...
The point is they were in many ways trapped because they had lost connection with the cosmos. And so there's the physical entrapment, which is not going to necessarily happen, at least in the way that we can't go to the moon, we can't go to Mars or anything like that. But we could limit what we can do in space. We can actually ruin a lot of the assets that we're building right now. And that's a way that we could be trapped. Okay, we'll do one more question because that was a really excellent question.
You mentioned that we have begun creating regulations for things that are sent to space, that they need to have a way of controlled reentry. And I was wondering if there was any talk or initiative to clean up the 2200 abandoned satellites floating in space, or are we thinking of ways of possibly intercepting them when they begin reentry?
So what you're alluding to is called active debris removal. And this is something that has been researched for some time now. The problem is it's really, really hard. And what you want to do is take down the really big objects first because they are future debris. They are large reservoirs of debris. Rocket bodies.
are hit by other debris, hit by meteoroids, and that produces debris itself. Sometimes they have residual fuel, which explodes, creates tremendous debris. Dead satellites, particularly really big dead satellites, can have their batteries explode. And so there are lots of things that can happen that create tremendous debris. And so there is a list, and I don't know what it is off the top of my head, but there is a list of the top objects to take out of orbit if you could do it.
Now, the problem is you have a school bus in orbit that's rapidly rotating. And that's what you have to capture and then bring it down in a controlled and consistent way. And it's really hard. And for the astronomers in the room, we have a Hubble problem. So the casualty risk of Hubble is 1 in 250.
So right now, we don't know where it's going to come down, but just that it has a 1 in 250 chance of killing somebody on its way down if it's not deorbited in a controlled way. Of course, that is with our ignorance of where it's going to come down. You can look at how the last or possible orbits just before it comes down and that...
Casualty risk could be much less or could be much, much higher. It is really big and it has a lot of glass. So when is that supposed to come down? So if there's no changes, it'll be roughly 2037. That's as best as I can predict with models and others have done similar. And you have to be able to get it really before it loses all of its reaction wheels because then it will tumble and you won't be able to control it. So is it hard to keep track of?
Well, no, we know where it is, and it works. The problem is if you push it to the point where it stops working, then we could lose control. So there might have to be a hard decision where Hubble is still working, but for safety considerations, you bring it down a little bit early. Okay, everyone. That was an excellent, excellent lecture and great questions. Thank you very much. Thank you, everyone.
You were listening to astrophysicist Aaron Boley delivering the 10th Annual Dan McClellan Memorial Lecture in Astronomy. It was held at St. Mary's University in Halifax and produced by Ideas producer Mary Link. We'll have photos and links to more information about outer space stewardship at cbc.ca slash ideas. Special thanks to Robert Thacker, Technical Production Danielle Duval and Jeff Doan.
Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, senior producer Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.