Space Junk in the Trunk

know the deal. Leave no trades, right, leave nothing behind you bringing all your stuff, whether you're bringing in a backpack or a whole truckload of camping equipment, you need to leave with only your thing, taking only memories with you, and leaving no litter behind, right, I mean, that's that's the way it works. You don't just bury all your pots and pants and then market Well yeah, well, I mean, okay, if you're coming back at the same camping place, maybe

you could make that argument. But okay, I see, I see a concept that you're coming up here. But the whole idea is that we want to be able to come back to that place and enjoy it in its natural form without having to put up with a bunch of litter and a bunch of garbage changing that environment. Now, we generinally don't have to worry though about that potter pan that Julie left behind at the campsite. Traveling at immense speeds like five miles per second and smashing through

my crania right, clocking us in the head. I mean, that's just not a problem here at our campsites on Earth. But out there in the in the wild yonder it is a problem, right, which is directly tied to this idea of this big sky theory. Right, right, the big sky theory. I mean, the answer is in the words there, big sky. There's a lot of sky, There's a lot

of space. It's huge. We couldn't possibly litter enough to make space junk a problem, right, That was the old way of looking at If you have a space mission to go up there, solar panel floats off, no big deal, there's plenty of room, some nuts and bolts fought in the pockets, no big deal. Satellites dead, and I just leave it there. This big sky theory, we can we can just leave everything wherever it happens to die and it'll never be a problem. It'll never come home to roost,

this problem of space junk. Uh. But it is a problem that has come home to roost. NASA has tracked around on sixteen thousand bits of debris. That's a lot measuring over ten sent meters about four inches, but there are millions of smaller bits and pieces that are thought to be swarming up in the cosmos. And the more we've involved ourselves in orbit and an owner space, the

more stuff we wind up with up there. Like just to look at sort of the timeline for this, if we look back at two thousand and five, we had a catalog of debris up there somewhere in the neighborhood of ten thousand pieces, and that's just stuff that we were tracking in New off Specifically, by two thousand ten, that number had reached fifteen thousand, so it's risen by

five thousand pieces of space junk. And just that short amount of time, and fast forward to today, you have more and more players in the space game, involving themselves in the space game and taking that the big sky approach to space exploration. Well, especially when you get into the privatized territory as well, right, this becomes a real issue.

The other issue is that space junk travels at speeds up to seventeen thousand, five hundred miles per hour, So that's fast enough for a tiny piece of debris to damage a satellite or spacecraft it's really big concerned or the International Space Station, which we will talk about later, can finentially set up a chain reaction where you have one pieces suddenly crashing into another and which causes debris

to spiral out from that to hit other pieces. In many cases we're talking about dead objects hitting other pieces of garbage. But then what happens when this stuff collides with operative telecommunication satellites or exploratory missions or manned missions. You can see where this becomes a very dangerous problem very quickly. That's something called cascading collisions. This idea that things are slamming into each other and just creating more and more and more debris. So this has come home

to roost. And let's talk about back in the day. Back in the seventies when this was just a theory, and a guy named Donald Kessler, who was assigned to the Environmental Effects Project Office at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, became very interested in the craft that was abandoned and the void. Yeah, he wrote an important paper

at the time. It's become more important over time. Originally he was having to really sort of shot on the mountain to get people to listen to him, But he wrote a paper called Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites the Creation of a good rebelt, and his argument was that if we and this is early on, everyone else's seems

to be sticking to this big sky theory. But Kessler says, look, if we don't start controlling this now, if we don't start mitigating the problem now, we are going to reach a point where we basically have a belt of debris around the planet. If you've ever seen the movie Wally, the depictions of Earth in that which the Earth is just so crowded with satellites that for anything to enter or exit Or's atmosphere they have to sort of move

things out of the way. That's basically what he's talking about, except in his scenario, we reach a point with that to where we are stranded on Earth. Basically we are suddenly limited by what we can do and what we can explore in space. We kind of dig our own grave, you will, by just clotting our atmosphere with all of

this junk. Yeah yeah, well not our atmosphere, but our uproar, right right, I mean, it does constrain our ability to explore the universe because it's kind of hard to launch something and then know that it's going to be taken out by a story piece of space junk. But he was basically saying, look, I estimate this to happen in the thirty to forty years. Now. This was alarming. It

really was an eye opener. Even though people like our thirsty Clark, who actually conceived a communication satellite, had talked about this in the forties, I believe it was really Kessler who spent the time looking out at the Cosmos and looking through his telescope and saying, Okay, guys, this is this is real polity. This is a bigger problem than we thought. His vision of it was very apocular. Who was who's talking about like a new dark Age? Oh yeah he was. Yeah. He was actually saying that

it would take a civilization down to the studs. Yeah, you know, he's fictioning it up a little bit, but maybe not too much. You know, that is the idea extrapolated to the denth degree. Right, you can take down on the communication satellites and you know, all this sort of technology that we do with today and our life is predicated on, and you could really sort of fold up humanity in the sense. But but we're we're not there.

I do want to say that NASA set up the Orbital Debris Program Office in response to Cussler's paper, but I'm not gonna say it's a two. It was a toothless organization, but it wasn't It was didn't really seem like a big concern. It's like, oh, yeah, this could happen, and it's a theory, let's set a committee and uh, I mean you know how that yeah, yeah, and the guidelines they didn't really help to actually reduce space waste.

So here we are, thirty years later, right on time, two thousand and nine, we have a couple of events that really usher in this idea that Kessler didn't just have a theory. It is a syndrome. And that's why it's called custlers. Yeah. February ten, two thousand nine, we had two satellites, Iridium thirty three, which is flying north relaying a phone conversations. And then there was this long retired Russian communication satellite called Cosmos and it's just tumbling

east and an uncontrolled orbit. So you have an active satellite and an inactive satellite and then they collide. And this was not even a collision that was on the forecast because at this time we knew some of the stuff that was going on there and we can sort of excrapolate what might run into what what time. But this wasn't even scheduled to happen, if you will. They just ram into each other and of course just completely annihilate each other, and they create all these other pieces

of debris. Right, they smashed into something like a two thousand one pieces. And this is over the Siberian tundra. And although it doesn't really affect us too much, I mean I think there's some drop calls from this one collision. Right, the fact of the matter is, again, this debris, this cloud of debris was created, and we know that that begets even more and more debris. And it was a

big wake up call. And according to wire dot com Evan L. Schwartz great article in this he said that each chard an orbiting cannonball capable of destroying yet another hunk of high priced hardware. That's the real problem there, Yeah, I mean expense going into any of these satellites, communications or otherwise. So the idea that you just have junk up there that could conceivably just wipe it out. People suddenly started taking even more notice following this two thousand

and nine event. Yep, So pretty soon in a military unit called the Space Surveillance Network was set up. They began to monitor the debris by They were looking at one thousand active satellites, three thousand, seven hundred inactive satellites and rocket pieces, and another fifteen thousand, three hundred objects

the size of a fist or larger. And these numbers started to bear out this idea that we could have maybe seventy five collisions a day, and that doesn't include the half million smaller pieces of debris the size of a marble or larger, all of which is again capable of just wiping out satellites or you know, other things that are very valuable to us. Another key incident that happened, and this is just a few months after the Cosmos Iridium collision, and I think I imagine most of you

remember this. I remember it because working here at how stuff works and anything news the inside I see that happens. We suddenly latch onto a bit and this was big news because two thousand nine, suddenly there's an object, piece of space junk headed towards the International Space Station. So this is an immensely expensive piece of equipment here. We're talking in excess of a hundred billion dollars worth of equipment, human beings on board, a lot invested in this. This

is part of our space legacy moving forward. And there's a piece of junk headed towards it that could conceivably white it all out. So we have to rush everybody on board into essentially a lifeboat kind of a panic room, right yeah, because they're like, all right, we might miss us, but it might hit you, and if it hits us, we're gonna have to somehow save you, guys. So get into this lifeboat and want to see what happens. Now, Luckily it missed by a few miles, but it's still

in the vasts of space. I mean, that's like shaving off a little piece of hair on your head there. And it was like a couple of months after that, another piece of space junk hurled towards the International Space Station, this time missing them by just a mile. And this frag meant would have had an impact equal to a truck bomb. In fact, I've got a quote here from

Jack Bacon, he's a senior NASA scientist. He says, a ten centimeter sphere of aluminum would be like seven kilograms of T and T it would blow everything to smith rings. I mean, we can shield these things to a certain degree. There's a project at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston where they basically take chunks of plastic and basically space junk and they just fire them at shields and panels to see exactly what the damages. And they're able to determine.

Within a certain size of space junk, they can sort of shield something out. But when you're getting these larger pieces, it becomes increasingly impossible to create a space vessel or a satellite. They could withstand that kind of damage, right, right, especially when you're talking about delicate of material such as solar of cells. Yeah, and just to give everybody an

idea too, I mean we're talking again. I think you talked about this, some tools or some nuts and bolts, that kind of space junk to the size of rocket stages, the size of school buses. There's an immense variety of based junk up there. Now. One might ask doesn't all this stuff eventually just fall into the Earth's atmosphere and burn up, because that was part of the big sky theory as well, that all right, if we'll leave something

up there, it's not gonna be a problem. And b it's eventually just going to drift down and re enter the Earth atmosphere and probably burn up and or land in the middle of nowhere or more likely in the middle of the ocean somewhere, which is what most reinering does. Occasionally, something will fall on somebody's backyard and it's a local news story, front page for the next five years. But for the most part, yes, that's true, it just falls

in the middle of nowhere. But it can take decades for something in orbit to actually re enter the atmosphere, which is why you still have some of the original satellites that went up there. I mean, they're all still up there and again, and not all of them burn up upon re entry, right, because it depends on the size, right, Right, depends on the size of rocket stage. The size of

school bus isn't necessarily going to burn up there. So we're gonna take a quick break and when we get back, we're going to talk about this idea of how we can in teen space junk and getting our janitorial services up there and taking care of it. All Right, we're back. I want to throw out another quick fact. This is from the Wired article you mentioned earlier. But nineteen sixty two that's when the kel Star one satellite relaid the first phone call and TV signals across the Atlantic and

ended up failing the next year. So nine three this thing dies. It's still up there, just up there doing nothing, just a big piece of space junk floating around. And and in the decades since, of course, we've rolled out more and more stuff. Just to give you a little idea about how we end up with that huge number of fifteen thousand plot well, now it's up to sixteen

thousand pieces of space jump. Yeah. I mean it's really hard to actually keep tabs on anyway, because, as we talked about, it's you know, you have some particles that are so small that you can't even really engage them

or track them. I should say. Another incident that kind of woke everyone up to the dangers and the problems posted by space Junk of January eleven, two thousand seven, the Chinese government stayed this demonstration of its military might by basically shooting down or not really shooting down, but blowing up one of its retired satellites with something called a kinetic kill vehicle, so to demonstrate that they had the potential to take out a satellite, which in a

military scenario would be very valuable if you satellite our keys to tall communication networks, to our ability to get strategic information about what an enemy is doing. And they were demonstrating, yes, we can take these out satellite killing technology. I mean, that's that's been on the military playlist for some time now. But they demonstrate this. They blow up this old satellite. Big deal, right, They're just shooting some junk in the backyard. There are people out in the

sticks that do that every day. But when they shot this thing, it blasted into three thousand trackable pieces. That's just trackable pieces, but three thousands. So one military demonstration later, that number we have that tally of measurable space junk up there rises by three thousand pieces. Yeah, I mean it was a total jerk move. I mean it's really irresponsible, knowing what we know to a certain degree now. But the problem with this is six percent of the pieces

have re entered the atmosphere. And here's the interesting thing. Half of those pieces came down in the last twelve months, and this has to do with increased solar activity, which normally we kind of it's not something we get really excited about in terms of like, yeah, increased solar activity. This idea of solar maximum or peak activity could actually be a boon to us in terms of cleaning up space junk. Right, the Sun, as we've mentioned before, is

pumping out energy. It's pumping out energy of the Earth, and some of this is shielded by our electromagnetic field, but the rest of it actually reaches the Earth. Powers the Earth gives us a lot of the stuff we need, and if we have all the space junk floating around out there, an increase in that solar activity can stir

things up a bit. Yeah. In fact, if we've got these solar players in these kernal mass ejections, which by the way, when I talk about this solar maximum, this peak activity is eleven year period that is going to come to fruition in I believe in terms of the ultimate amount of solar activity. So I think of it as blasting the atmosphere with heat with these solar players and coronal mass ejections from you know, sort of raining

upon the Earth's atmosphere. This causes the atmosphere to expand, and this expansion pushes some of the gas to higher altitudes, which creates drag on orbiting space debris that causes it to slow down. And then as the debris slows down or gravity pulls it to the lower altitudes where the atmosphere is even thicker. So then you get even more drag, right, and then you get slower debris. So eventually debris re enters the atmosphere sooner than it would without the solar influence.

And here's here's the good news. It burns up safely for the most part. So that's why we've seen such an influx of that Chinese satellite that those pieces coming in. So there's this idea that the Sun could actually be very helpful at least until when it when it reaches its peak capacity or maximum output in the eleven year period and helping us to keep taps on this of it. Okay, so we're keeping tabs, we've been keeping tabs. Occasionally the

Sun might accidentally help out sort of solar hoovering. Yeah, but what else are we doing, right, that's the big question. We can exercise a little bit of forethought in the way we plan missions and uh, you know, moving forward. But there's still a lot of junk up there. What are we doing give anything to clean it up? Well, there's something called the Swiss Janitor satellite. This comes to us from the Swiss Space Center at EPFL and that's

the launch of the clean Space one. This was back in February, I believe, and it's a project that developed and built the first installment of a family of what they see as satellites that are especially designed to clean up space debris. And the idea is to launch a small grabber spacecraft to chase after orbiting pieces of space junk, and then it'll attach itself to it de orbit and the whole Incholado then re enters the atmosphere where it

burns up on re entry. There are a few other plans to that involve basically micro satellites are many satellites that around and essentially net this stuff up and kind of form like not really a Katamari ball, but they form a nice big sack of space traction then bring it back to the atmosphere to Another tactic that we've been using is making sure that we take retiring spacecraft up to a graveyard orbit so that we know they're

going out of commission. Well, let's move them into an orbit where they're not going to be interfering with anything. It's actually active, okay, So just sort of pushing it away from us a little bit more, right in the same way that you move your junk car into the backyard as opposed to leaving it in the front yard. It's still there, you just can't see it from the street right right, house values go up. There's this idea of using little puffs of gas that I kind of like.

It's just from a team from the University of Michigan, and they're thinking about using pulses of gas fired into the path of debris and this would increase again the drag on orbiting space junk, leaving it to plunge downward into the Earth's atmosphere, and the pulses themselves would leave no no trace. So there we get our our boy scouts creta there, and it also leaves no solid material in orbit. Another really interesting tactic that NASA is pretty

excited about comes from Tether's Unlimited. This is a Seattle area space contractor and they've been working on this idea for years. But their idea is to create this thing called a wrestler, which is a mid sized vehicle about four hundred pounds, and it piggybacks a ride on other satellites. So it so the idea here is, let's cut some corners. It'll just hit your ride with some sort of big price e corporat or national supported telecommunication satellite launch or

or mission launch. And then once up there, it's saying to pull off this really neat tethering technique. So it goes into orbit and it sidles up to this piece of space junk and it detaches an electrodynamic tether. This is a wire mesh tail. It's up to six miles long, and then it shoots an amp of current through that material and this current interacts with the Earth's magnetic field, producing a drag effect that lowers the debris towards the

atmosphere and re entry. Yeah, and that one's really cool because that seems pretty promising in the perspective of gathering up debris, but not only that, just being able to afford it. I think that was estimated somewhere in the tens of millions whereas some of the other ideas and projects we're talking in the billions. Yeah, they're saying this one would just to do a test mission, mind you, that would take out a few tons of trash, would be tens of millions of dollars, which which again puts

this whole problem into perspective. Like like so many problems that humans get themselves into on a personal or national scale, you don't work on a problem early enough, it ends up costing you far more later on, and it reaches a point where you have to either pay that bill or just be content with sticking where you are. Well.

And this is the kind of problem too, is just like your house if you don't necessarily want to put all your money into, you know, redoing the roof, but you have to write because otherwise you're going to be explicit to the elements. But that's not the cool thing you see from the street. Same thing with Nassa's like, that's not our flashy cool stuff. It really do need

to take care of the space chunk. The problem is that they don't necessarily have a gigantic budget in the first place, and it's certainly not something that they have dedicated to this problem in the budget from last year, they started the four thousand dollar research grants to try to look into this, and that idea that you just talked about was was in there and very viable. So it's just a question about of when and how many dollars are gonna lay down here, and then it's a

question of exponential numbers here. Again, this is from Evan L. Schwartz, he says, and this is the Wired article waste management. He says, it's proliferations based junk threatens not only current in future space missions, but also global communications, mobile phone networks, satellite television, radio broadcasts, weather tracking, military surveillance, even the

dashboard GPS devices that keep us from getting lost. The number of manufactured objects cluttering the sky is now expected to double every few years as large objects weaken and split apart, and new collisions create more castlerian debris leading to yet more collisions. So it's kind of a runaway environment here. Yeah, and like we said before, it affects modern life on so many levels. I mean telecommunications certainly,

space exploration, but national security. Just again, our entire tell communications network, it is growing to depend on these satellites. Now you could argue, I guess that if we had a completely garbaged up orbit, if we had this good rebout going on, then that it would be harder for say like a vampire spaceship to drift into our atmosphere and cause problems, or the or the head of a

planet sized transformer. Um, you know, good luck getting into our junk up atmosphere and causing trouble for the denizens of Earth. But on the other hand, we we might be trapped in this dark age that Clark warned us about. It's possible, But I mean, I think that the fact that it's come to life and it's now a priority, and that people are realizing that space junk may drop in your backyard if it's not under control pretty soon

as a problem. Yeah. And if I know anything about the human species, once we know that there's a problem and we know that we've been causing it, we're really good about fixing it and addressing it. So I think you're right. Let's be optimistic about this. Okay, now, now you're just being facetious. Let's just put that out there on the line, all right, So there you go, space drunk, Let's work on it. Let's come up with some ideas.

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