Space Pollution Poses Orbiting Issues

Donald Kessler has been warning space agencies for over 30 years that dead satellites, spent rockets and other debris in low geosynchronous orbit around Earth would eventually start making it difficult to launch spacecraft. Now over a half million pieces of space junk are making rocket launches and leaving the atmosphere more dangerous, with space agencies and companies planning spaceship routes just to avoid orbiting garbage.

Dr. Kessler says, “The hazard is increasing and there is a necessity to start cleaning up space.”

The the former NASA astrophysicist began worrying in 1978 that there would come a time when a collision with existing space junk would cause a cascade. At that point every subsequent collision would lead to more junk and more collisions in a chain reaction. He is the author of a new report by the National Research Council, urging NASA to tackle the problem of space junk.

Two recent events made the problem snowball and have place increased pressure on several countries to take action to reduce the problem.

In 2007 China fired a missile to blow up an old weather satellite. That one event created about 150,000 new pieces of space junk larger than one centimeter, the smallest particles that can be tracked.

In 2009 two satellites collided adding another 100,000 pieces of space garbage to track and making the problem much worse. Both events worked to double the debris field around Earth.

With more than a half million threatening foreign objects, ranging from paint chips to lost astronaut tools, being tracked from the ground, several nations are actively working to make space in space by cleaning up the junk.

Some ideas being floated seem exotic or far-fetched. One includes using a giant magnet to collect all the scrap metal — from satellites and spent rockets. In February Japan announced its plan to send up a giant magnetized net to sweep up space debris. Another suggestion is to use a laser broom.

The new report urges NASA and the U.S. State Department to take space junk seriously because those agencies are in the best position to overcome legal and technical hurdles necessary to solve the problem.

But many people say if you don’t create as much junk there will be less to clean up. Robert Massey, a spokesman for the Royal Astronomical Society says, “But I think actually, fundamentally one thing we have to tackle is the idea of not producing so much of this stuff in the first place.”

Space Junk Breakdown

Pieces larger than ten centimeters tracked by U.S. Strategic Command — 22,000 (only 1,000 of which are live satellites)
Debris between one and ten centimeters — 300,000 (periodically tracked)
Debris smaller than one centimeter — up to nine million (too small to track)