March 25, 2021 • 48 mins
The orbits hundreds to thousands of miles above Earth are littered with garbage. Space garbage, sure, but it’s still garbage. Littering in space is bad enough but it poses practical problems too – like space junk crashing into satellites or astronauts.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
astro Clark, and there's Charles after Burn, Bryant okay, and
(00:22):
Jerry Goose Roland is out there. Way do you call
me after burning because I'm gassy? Yep, although we've been
we've been tooting for a year straight and no one
even no, I don't care except us. Have you ever
set one of your ducks on fire? Have I ever
lit a fart? I was hoping to not use that word,
(00:43):
but yes, uh yeah, I used to. There was a
period in my youth where I thought that was just
about the funniest thing ever. And I still think it's
pretty hysterical. I just don't do it. I never thought
it was funny. I've always just been more wowed by it.
You know. It's I'm mean, the notion of it, now
as I've gotten older, is more funny than the act itself.
The notion that we can expel flammable cats from our
(01:06):
But it's pretty great. And then do you remember that
cautionary tale that um that if you lit it, it it
could travel up into your rectum and cook your inside
some sort of a reverse thing. There must have just
been like some I don't know, some department somewhere, some
obscure federal agency that was tasked with coming up with
(01:28):
fake cautionary tales to scare kids out of doing things
that where they weren't behaving, you know. Yeah, And I
think what my most cherished memories were the times where
people swore that it wasn't possible, that oh that you
couldn't light it, they wouldn't work. Yeah, So proving proving
that was always sort of the most fun because it
(01:50):
was just like hilarity ensued, and also you just got
to be like in your face, like literally come down here,
because I'm gonna light this in your face if you're
just so sure it's not going to catch fire. And
I always had a theory that it would get rid
of the smell kind of instantaneously too. I think it
just burned it out. I think it did. So it's
really an efficient way of clearing the air. What are
(02:12):
we doing? Well, we're talking chuck about space junk and
actually not the band, the whole thing. What there's a
immediately had to look it up because I was going
to say a great band name, but there's a band
out of Buffalo named space Junk. Yeah, out of Buffalo.
I guess that. I guess that um that affords being mentioned. Sure,
(02:33):
sure um, Okay, So space Junk, not the band, the
actual stuff stuff floating around in space. It turns out
there's a lot of it. And I actually have a
little bit of an intro here. I'm gonna do a little,
um a little. It wasn't the lighting, No, that was
a pre showed tangent. Okay, I think it's that classification.
(02:56):
No UM. Back in the seventies, there is a guy
who worked for NASA called Donald Kessler, and he was
an interesting cat in and of himself, but one of
the claims to fame that he has is that his
name became synonymous with a um an unstoppable chain reaction
(03:16):
of collisions of space junk called the Kessler syndrome. And
the Kessler syndrome that Kessler came up with is based
on this idea that if you get enough stuff floating
around in orbit around Earth, eventually this stuff is going
to smash into other stuff up there because these things
are traveling at very high speeds, and when they smash
(03:37):
in another they're going to potentially break into more and
more pieces, and then those pieces are going to go
on and they're going to smash into other things, and
so this chain reaction will begin to where there's just
pieces constantly smashing into one another, and all of a
sudden were trapped on Earth because we can't make it
through the debris field we accidentally created. Hence the ks
(03:59):
the Kessler sin drome has struck again like a like
a far being lit in your face, but in the
face of humanity as a whole. Yeah, and I think
some some scientists these days say that parts of our
orbit are already like that, right, Yeah, there, Yes, So
Kessler was basically saying he made these predictions in the
seventies um and he he said, based at the rate
(04:21):
that we're going, will probably will reach a critical mass
or in about thirty to forty years. And a lot
of people said, well, we've reached that point, and I
think Kessler is actually right. The thing is, we can't
really see everything that's up there, so we have to
make guesses and assumptions. We actually track a very respectable
amount of space chunk considering that we're just down here
(04:43):
on Earth, that we actually can track things going really
fast that are really small, traveling really far above the Earth.
But there's a lot of it that's just too small
for our current technology to track. So we have to
make guesses about what all is up there. And it
looks like there's a lot of stuff up there, and
it's possible we have reached critical mass and this this
cascading collision, the chain reaction, it just hasn't started yet. Yeah,
(05:08):
I mean, I was just about to correct myself when
I said some people say it's already there, that I
didn't mean. It's all just so people understand it's already
like we can't travel through these places, but that process
has started such that it can't be reversed, Like even
if we stop launching anything, they're like, it's too late. Yeah,
once that chain reaction starts, I mean, there's nothing we
(05:28):
can do about it. I mean, we can't even get
a lot of the space chunk that's up there out now.
I can't imagine when they've started on a chain reaction.
That's got to make catching it even even more difficult.
So a lot of people say, well, let's do everything
we can to avoid that cascade inclusion that Kessler syndrome
from ever starting and a lot of people sitting out
(05:49):
there chuck, I'm guessing are like, wait, what are you
guys talking about with space Chunk? What is the space Chunk? Yes,
I'm well versed with the band from Buffalo. I have
all of their CDs. I got them all for free
just walking past this one street corner many times over
multiple years. But I don't know about the actual space junk.
And it never occurred to me that the band space
(06:10):
Junk is based on a real thing, right, so space
junk I kind of always assume people knew what this was.
But we've made that assumption before about things like I
don't know trees, and people said, why don't you just
grub what a tree is? Parrots? So, oh, by the way,
thanks for all the parrot pictures from all over the world.
(06:31):
Has been delightful. But space junk is you know, it
can be a lot of things. NASA actually has a
sort of a list that describes it better than we could. UM.
A lot of it is abandoned spacecraft or spacecraft that
doesn't work anymore, so we abandon it. Um. This can
be big, full spaceships, or it can be parts of spaceships.
(06:52):
Because as we'll learn and as you know, if you follow,
you know, if you're a rocket enthusiast, like those things
break apart, and we'll get to that, but there are
many pieces that are quite large that are just sort
of left up there until they come back down or
they hit something else. Um. Some of this stuff is,
like I said, parts of rockets that have broken apart,
(07:15):
usually upper stage, because that lower stage stuff breaks off
early enough to where it generally, you know, after a
few years, may tumble back towards Earth, burn up hopefully
so where nothing actually hits Earth, but that upper stage
stuff is kind of stuck up there. Yeah. Yeah, that's
that's one thing that you'll you'll find out about things
that we place into orbit. The further away from Earth
(07:39):
that this thing is circling the Earth, um, the the
longer it's going to take to come back down to Earth.
So that, yeah, because it's the force of gravity that
pulls these things in orbit back down to Earth eventually. Right. Yeah.
What else? Uh? What else do we have? Motor affluent? Yeah,
so a lot of unspent fuel, a lot of cocket fuel,
(08:00):
a solid fuel and then kids, I was looking it up,
that includes ammonium nitrate appropriately enough, but it all yeah,
um and enemy um. But it also includes gunpowder, black gunpowder.
That's what they use as solid rocket fuel sometimes, which
is like we've come really far, but also not far
at all, you know. Um. So there's canisters of of
(08:22):
gunpowder floating around up in space, which are particularly problematic
because not only can they break things apart, they can
really break things apart because they may explode when they
impact things going as fast as they travel. Uh. And
then the last thing, and we'll get to all the
detail about all this stuff and why it's dangerous. But
little bitty, little tiny things, little tiny flex of paint,
(08:43):
even millions of them, can cause a lot of damage.
I think there was, you know, reports from astronauts that say,
you know that work on the Hubble that are like,
this thing looks like it a car that's been through
a hailstorm. You know, it's just like getting constantly pelted,
and you think a speck of paint, who cares. But
(09:03):
when these things are going twenty something miles an hour,
it can cause some damage. Yeah. I think his famous
quote back to ground Control was this thing looks like
a seventy two nova. So when we when we The
thing about space junk is that you have to remember
is every single bit of it used to be here
(09:25):
on Earth, and every single bit of it was launched
by humans. That's just space junk. There's plenty of other
stuff out in space, like asteroids and comets and pieces
of rocks flying around. That's not space. Yeah, et s
flying around, Um, that's not space junk. Space junk is
specifically things that humans have launched into Earth. So there's
this whole kind of air of um oh, I don't
(09:49):
know the actual word for it, but that we've we've
done this to ourselves, like we've created our own problem
and now we we've made this bed that we have
to lie in or figure out how to get out
of because it's so human. Yeah, isn't it that, like
let's destroy the Earth, let's start destroying space because we
may want to live up there, so we might as
(10:10):
well pre destroy it before we get up there to
really destroy it. And it makes sense though early on
in the space programs, you know, starting in the with
the launch of Sputnik, that's when the whole thing started.
But you know, it makes sense that we had the
technology get things up there, but not to get them
back down, and we knew that eventually their their orbit
(10:33):
was going to decay, they would be pulled down into
the atmosphere where it would probably burn up. So that
made sense at the beginning of the space race. But
as we got better and better at technology, the idea
that we could just litter space became less and less acceptable.
The problem is it didn't really go away, Like, there's
(10:54):
still basically stuff that's being launched up there today that
has no way of being brought back down. It's just
like we'll just leave it up there until it runs
out of its useful life and then hope for the best.
That's kind of how a lot of stuff is being
launched into space right now, and it's particularly galling because
we have the technology to bring it back down. It
(11:15):
just makes the whole thing more expensive, and I think
that that's why a lot of um companies and countries
don't include that. Yeah, there's a saying among contractors, a joke,
if you will, among contractors who build houses and fix
up houses. If there's something wrong and that that they're
working on and there's the homeowners and around, they just say,
(11:38):
I can't see it from my house. I've not heard.
That's kind of what's been going on here for years
with I mean not only space agencies, but private companies
as we'll see, uh, Amazon and Tesla and all kinds
of companies have plans to put a lot of a
lot more things into space. And it made me wonder, like,
(11:59):
who's regulating this stuff. We'll get to all that, But
what's kind of cool is since seven when sput Nick
was launched into space, nor AD started cat cataloging this
stuff and numbering them and naming them, and sput Nick
is object number one. And you know they did, they
do a really good job of keeping track of a
(12:19):
lot of this stuff. Like you said, considering we're down
here and it's up there, it's not too bad. Things
started breaking apart though, and getting smaller and colliding with
one another, creating hundreds and thousands of more smaller bits.
But we kind of, you know, our technology progress where
we could go smaller in our tracking abilities. And so
(12:40):
now the US Department of Defense started cattle logging anything
basically larger than I think a softball. I've seen grapefruit too,
so yeah, basically that size. If you're not familiar with softballs,
but you're crazy for citrus. It's grape fruit size too.
If you don't know either one of those, I'm sorry.
That's the best we can do. Maybe two of your
(13:01):
fists bawled up like good and I don't know how
big your fists are A good size snowball. Okay, somebody's like,
I'm from the Tropics, I don't know any of this stuff.
I'm from Buffalo. I know about snowballs and space jumps
and that catalog Chuck. By the way, it is pretty awesome.
It contains not just sput nick and all every satellite
(13:21):
ever created in every grapefruit size UM piece of debris.
But there's some other really interesting stuff in there too. UM.
The cremated remains or the canister containing the cremated remains
of Gene Roddenberry is one of them. The created star
trek UM, the Tesla roadster that UM SpaceX launched up.
(13:43):
That one. Yeah, especially when you start learning about the
space junk, you're like, this is not a good idea. Yeah,
what we don't need to do is just do like
pr stuff in space and then you know, like like
UM astronauts have lost entire boxes of tools on spacewalks
before UM and they're just out there floating around wrenches
(14:04):
and stuff like that. They're all in the catalog. They
cut that stuff tethered. You gotta tether it. Yeah, sometimes
that gets loose or they forget to tether it. Astro nuts.
They have hard days too, that's right. They have their
their B game on some days. But yeah, anything as
small as a softball. They're about twenty thou pieces orbiting
(14:24):
the Earth right now. And then there are about half
a million pieces the size of a marble or larger
that NASA is tracking. And then the paint flex just
good luck with that. There's millions of that and no one,
no one keeps track of it. Yeah, paint flexes, well,
just because we can't. We definitely would if we could,
but we just don't have the technology right now because
(14:45):
there's so so there's three orbits. I don't want to
do an episode on satellites one day, but just briefly,
but there's three orbits lowerth orbit, Middle Earth orbit UM,
not to be confused with the shire and um uh
g O sink in this orbit which is way up
there UM, and that's where your communication satellites are there,
(15:06):
GEO stationary. They basically if you stand in a spot
and could look up and there was a satellite ahead
of you or above, you would be there twenty four
hours a day, every day of the year. It's it's
it's it's moving in in line with one spot around
the Earth, and to do that you have to be
really far out. The stuff that's further closer to the
Earth travels the fastest, and it seems that lower Earth
(15:29):
orbit is the most crowded too. So the things that
are in lower Earth orbit are traveling the fastest, and
there's the most of them because it's the easiest to
get to. Right, I feel like that's a pretty good
setup if you include our two lighting stories. So maybe
we should take a break and talk a little bit
about some of the things they're doing to mitigate this
(15:51):
right after this. All right, So, there's a lot of
(16:22):
space junk out there, a lot of collisions happening. Um.
When satellites collide, like I said, they can create just
a very much bigger problem by creating lots more smaller pieces.
And there are a few countries. The USA is one
of them, China's one, India's one that we have used
missiles before. They're called anti satellite weapons a SATs to
(16:45):
physically damage a satellite, and basically what they do it's
very you know, we all kind of laughed when Armageddon
came out about sending people up there to drill holes
and then drop bombs in it. But when you look
at some of these things that we've thought to do,
they're all kind of rudimentry like that, Like let's just
send something in there and ram it into a satellite. Yeah,
(17:07):
shoot a missile at that thing the old fashioned way. Yeah,
that's called a kinetic kill model, which is it's exactly
that you shoot a missile at a satellite or something
up in space and you blow it into smithereens a
is a yosemite. Sam would say, right, so, um, you
don't want to do this, but a lot of countries do,
like you listed, Um, they have not only just the technology,
(17:31):
but have actually done this, have run these tests. And
I think it's kind of a two show of twofold
Show of Force where you're showing that like I can
launch really technically sophisticated stuff up there that I don't
want anyone else to know about, and then I can
destroy it before you could ever possibly find out about it.
Or I don't like your satellite and what it's doing.
(17:52):
I'm going to shoot that thing out of the sky.
I just showed all of you that I'm capable of
doing it. So so it makes sense, so I guess
in a geopolitical way, but up in space it makes
zero sense because when you blow up a satellite or something,
you blow it up into thousands of pieces of um
that grapefruit, softball snowball size um uh debris, and then
(18:17):
millions of smaller pieces, and all of a sudden, the
population that catalog of space chunk just increased by ten
or fifteen or twenty um depending on how big the
explosion wasn't how much debris it created. Yeah, and you
might think, because there have been satellites launched basically continuously
for you know, many many decades now, that they're banging
(18:39):
into each other at a decent rate. But that's actually
not the case yet as far as actual satellite collisions.
In February two thousand nine, the very first one happened,
um the cosmos with a K, so you know where
that one's from. The twenty Cosmos out of Russia collided
and it was defunct, collided with I think a private
(19:01):
one from a US company called Irridium, which sounds like
a total sci fi movie, bad guy company. I know,
I don't actually know. It doesn't strike me like that.
I get what you're saying, but I think it's a
very pleasant word. Okay. It makes me think of the
rainbow centrum vitamin logo kind of oh, Ridium find it
(19:22):
very Yeah, Well, one guy's evil corporation, there's another guy's
rainbow fighting. That's right. Uh. They were traveling at a
speed relative to each other about twenty two thousand miles
an hour and blew them up into you know, two
thousand pieces at least four inches in diameter, and then
(19:42):
like you said, thousands and thousands and millions of tinier
and tinier pieces. Right. So this is the first time
that was two thousand nine where they where two satellites
rammed into each other as as far as we know,
and I think it hasn't happened again yet right now.
But the thing is is, because there's so many satellites
up there and we're launching so many more, that um
(20:03):
that that it's going to happen again. It's just inevitable
that's going to happen again. Because you'll notice, you know,
while the Iridium satellite was operational, that Cosmos one was
in operational, meaning there's no way to control it or
move it. So the only way to avoid this collision
is for the Iridium controllers to move their's and I
guess they didn't have the warning or what why they
(20:25):
didn't move it, because there's as we'll see, there's a
there's collision maneuvers where you just basically move your satellite
out of the way if you think it's gonna gonna
hit something. But that didn't happen with this one. And
so because there's so many satellites that are defunct out
there that are traveling in opposite directions that really high speeds,
of course this is going to happen again. And the
(20:47):
Union of Concerned Scientists says that there's something like thirty
three I know they're great, UM thirty three hundred and
seventy two active satellites in orbit and at least three
thousand and more inactive satellites in orbit right now, So
it's definitely going to happen again. Yeah, I think the
Union of Concerned Scientists logo is I looked it up.
(21:10):
It's just UM a silhouette of two uh folded arms
with lab coat sleeves, scowling scowling arms. So yeah, it's
gonna happen again. I think there was one ESA official,
the European Space Agency, and this is paraphrasing, but said,
it's basically what we're doing. It's like every time a
(21:32):
ship goes out to see just leaving it out there,
like eventually this is going to be a real problem.
And I know that it's hard to imagine because it's
in space, but let me liken it to the ocean
and boats and it might get the your thick skulls. Yeah, um,
so yeah, it's it's basically a tragedy of the commons
that we're seeing right now. Um, but the commons are
(21:53):
becoming more and more crowded as the days go by.
That thirty three and seventy two active satellites in orbit,
I think that as of the beginning of the end
of that was a thousand more active satellites than there
were in two thousand nineteen, like exponentially. And one of
the reasons why it's picking up exponentially is that, um,
(22:15):
a lot of companies. I think there's at least eight
companies right now that have proposals to release um what
you're called mega constellations or swarms of satellites, and you
would you would need a swarm of satellites because these
things in lower Earth orbit travel so fast that if say,
like you're connected to one for your cell phone, it's
suddenly gone. So they handed off to the satellite behind
(22:37):
them and behind them and behind them, so that you'd
be continuous service. So the more of swarm of satellites
you have, the more connected you could be. And so
some of these proposals like um SpaceX is starlink swarm UM.
It aims to to create like global coverage of satellite
internet service, so everyone everywhere in the world will be
(22:59):
able to connect to really high speed WiFi because of
this swarm. So there's a benefit to it. But at
the same time, the SpaceX constellation requires twelve thousand satellites.
There's only called the swarm. There's only thirty three hundred
up there right now, and Elon Musk is saying that
he's going to add another twelve thousand just with his swarm.
(23:20):
So all of these satellites that are going up in
our in the process of going up, are about to
make the whole thing a lot more crowded. So yes,
the likelihood of a collision just is increasing, um by
by orders of magnitude every year from what I can tell. Yeah,
and you know, obviously one of the big risks here,
(23:41):
and we'll talk about all of them. Something falling on
to Earth and hurting people is one of the smaller risks,
even though that has happened when sky Lab very famously
fell out in the Western Australian outback. Um, but we'll
get to that. But that that's not the biggest risk.
The biggest risk is for for damage and collisions up there.
(24:02):
And we've got a lot of astronauts up there, we
have people living on space stations, we have people working
on that Hubble telescope. I mean, what't that was the
movie Gravity, right? That was space junk that caused their
whole thing, right, Yeah, they basically depicted a Kessler syndrome
chain reaction. Um, I guess the localized one in that
movie from from I had totally forgotten about it, but
(24:23):
I kept seeing references to it, so yeah, I kind
of remember it now, Like in that why she had
to take shelter somewhere with the ghost of George Clooney. Hey,
who wouldn't though, you know, did he even exist in
that movie? I don't remember. Yeah, is there a theory
that he was not real? No, I just didn't remember
if like he if like at the end they were
(24:44):
like and he never really existed, So he was there.
She was just remembering him later or imagining him there
later on, right, I think so? I mean I only
saw that once. Same here. Yeah. But Um, even stuff
like we said, as small as a paint flack, if
going twenty two thousand miles an hour, one centimeter paint
fleck can inflict enough damage as a or the same
(25:08):
amount as a five dred and fifty pound object going
about sixty miles an hour here on Earth. And if
that goes up to ten centimeters, it would be comparable
to a seven kilogram TNT blast paint flex paint fleck.
Marble's pretty amazing stuff if you think about it. Um.
And actually they've had to replace windows on the Space
(25:30):
Shuttle back when the Space Shuttle was in operation in
the US. UM, and they they there just be like
deep gouges and streaks um taken out of the windows.
And when they would analyze and they'd be like, that's
paint paint fleck did that. Yeah, And you know the
I S S And a lot of our work happens
(25:50):
below where most of this stuff is. But it's still
a danger. It is a danger. So one of the
reasons why it's a dangerous because again, um, the the
I S S is it. It's two hundred and fifty
miles above Earth, four hundred and three kilometers above the
surfaces in lower Earth orbit UM. But it is one
of the most vital pieces of space technology that's up
(26:12):
there right now. UM. So we want to protect it.
We want to keep the I S S safe. UM.
The problem is is that there's a lot of stuff
above it, and when that stuff eventually comes back down
to Earth, it might pass by the I s's coming down,
and then the stuff that's also in lower Earth orbit
around the I S S could run into it from
(26:33):
the side or from the opposite direction UM, or like
at a ninety degree plane. So the I S S
is constantly under threat. And NASA's UM and I think
the E s A. A bunch of different agencies that
use the I S S have come up with procedures
for basically moving it if if there's a high enough
chance that that a collision will occur. And when we
(26:55):
talk about high enough chance, we're saying, like one in
a hundred thousand chants is enough reason to move the
I S. S out of the way. Yeah, And they
came up with a pretty um I mean, it seems
pretty obvious, but it's a pretty smart way to determine
if it's dangerous or not. They said, we need to
get an area around these things where we can determine
(27:18):
if it's you know, basically a close call or not.
And we're gonna call it the pizza box because that's
what it looks like. And everybody loves pizza. Everyone knows
what pizzas. Do we have to describe that? Please? No,
we have an episode on pizza, so go listen to.
There's some guy eating a grapefruit. Is like, never heard
of pizza. But it's shaped like a pizza box, is
(27:38):
flat and it's rectangular. Uh, it's about thirty miles across,
a mile deep, thirty miles long. And the idea is that,
you know, imagine the I. S. S or whatever important
satellite in the middle of this pizza box in space.
And they say, if anything, if we predict anything will
come within the bounds of that pizza box, then that
(28:00):
means that we have to get together and and decide
what to do, at least not necessarily take the action,
because then you've got to determine the probability of collision.
But that's when it gets their attention, I think, right.
So if they figure out that there's a one and
a hundred thousand chants of UM of collision and moving
the I S S isn't going to just be like, well,
(28:22):
the mission scrap now because we needed the I S
S three ft to the left, um, and now we
can't do anything, so just forget it, just forget the
whole thing. Um. They will move the I S S.
If there's a one in ten thousand chance of collision
um and it won't jeopardize the lives of the crew,
then they'll move the I S S. Mission be damned, Um,
(28:45):
they don't take that lightly. And then one other thing
they might do if they don't have time to move
the I S S, they'll put the crew into whatever
capsule brought them there. If the soy Use rocket that
that brought them there is docked, or if one of
SpaceX is Dragon capsules is docked. They'll they'll say, go
(29:06):
in there and hang out until this this uh predicted
m collision passes, but hang out there like it's like
a lifeboat basically. Form. Yeah, that's the one. The only
one that confused me a little bit. I mean, I
get the idea that that's a a good idea to
be sort of in the escape pod, but that escape
pod can also be crashed as well. Yes, good thinking.
(29:27):
You would make a very fine NASA flight engineer. Because, um,
I was reading an account of Scott Kelly, one of
the Kelly twins, the astronauts who are just so great. Um,
Scott Kelly was up on the I s s once
as a commander. I think when you're spending that year
in space, and um, there was a predicted collision that
(29:47):
was enough to tell them to go sit in the
Sayers rocket And they said, but don't close the hatch
because it's possible that the the capsule could get hit
and you might need to get out of the capsule
really quick too. But then you know, if the I
Sess this hit, you can close the hatch very quickly
and and um disembark. I guess, so, yes, yeah, I
wonder if they like, they did that for the very
(30:11):
first time. They said, just go get in the escape pod.
I'm simplifying things of course for Star Wars fans. And
they go get in the space pod and close the
door and they go they go, all right, we're all
good now, right, And then they look at each other
and they're like, not really, yeah, that it was were
just in another thing. It was an interesting account they were.
They were just kind of he said, it was a
little tense. But then the time the predicted time of
(30:34):
collision came and went, and you know, they were finally like, okay,
can we can we get out now? But he said
it was a little a little like it was very
quiet and they could just hear themselves in one another breathing,
and that was about it. But I mean, this dangerous
work and they understand this. But the goal is to
bring them all back always. But you know, when you
go into you know, it's like being a fire firefighter
(30:54):
or something. You know that there's a risk that you
might not come back. There's gotta be oh yeah, for sure.
I just want that to be as minimal as possible. Yes,
And they take extraordinary measures to make sure that that
it's as minimized as possible for sure. Should we take
another break? I think so, man, and we're going to
come back and talk about what to do about this
(31:15):
space junk problem. Okay, So, um, we I think have
(31:47):
established that space junk is kind of a problem, and
not just for the I S S, not just for satellites.
I think one thing we kind of left out is
if these satellites, you know, crash into each other, there's
somebody's dish TV gone, how are you gonna watch? Are
you gonna watch the Big Game? Then you're not. So
space chunk affects US one and all, um, and there's
all sorts of other things that could happen. Um, if
(32:10):
our satellites start going out, it's not something we want.
We also don't want the crew of the I S
S to get hurt. But also eventually in the future
when we go back to the Moon and then when
we travel beyond the Moon, um, we're gonna be needing
to go in and out of Earth's orbit and we
don't want there to be some crazy to brief field
that we have to navigate around or wait to pass
(32:31):
or whatever. So this is something we need to to
mitigate right now, and it is just beginning to be
something that um, some of the space agencies, not all
unfortunately in some countries, and some companies are starting to
take seriously and figure out how to mitigate. Yeah, I
mean think about space tourism and on these companies, they're like, hey,
(32:52):
how'd you like to fly up there for a hundred
thousand dollars and risk being plowed into by paint flex
Right a paint fl being taken out by a paint
flight is just undignified. Uh So the u N gets
involved a little bit and they say, hey, how about everyone,
all you companies sending satellites up there, why don't you
(33:13):
promise to remove these things at least twenty five years
after the end of their mission. And everyone said, sure,
we'll do that. U N. Um, how are you going
to enforce that? And the un says, I don't know,
we're asking nicely, though, all the space agencies kind of
slowly encircled the u N and then grabbed it and
(33:34):
gave it a wedgie. But people, I'm kind of joking,
But people in these agencies they do know it's a
problem they and they are coming up with things kind
of Armageddon style. I mean literally space Next is it
with you in that movie? I just always thought it
was the dumbest thing, Like, how am I supposed to
believe this? That this is how they're gonna solve this
(33:56):
problem by just blowing this thing up by drilling holes
in it and putting bombs in it. And then the
more I read about stuff like this, the more I
think that's an actual idea that they could do. Yeah. Yeah,
I mean we're like maybe a decade off from space mining,
I would guess, like mining asteroids. I just I feel like, uh,
I don't want to give Michael Bay credit for coming
(34:18):
up with a plausible thing, because I just still want
to say he's ridiculous. But it's not because they have
space nets and they have space harpoons and space magnets
and these are some of the things that they actually
use to drag these things, uh close enough to where
it falls out of orbit and then ideally burns up. Yeah,
(34:38):
like removed debris, right, yeah, removed debris was it was
kind of cool. The European Space Agency said, you know what,
we have this defunct satellite up there called the Vistat,
and why don't we just put a bounty on this
thing to see what people can come up with and
just say, you know, go hog wild and see what
(34:59):
you can see what you and do. Bruce Willis, Yeah,
you gotta tell them about Embasat and what it is
and what it's doing right now through space. Well, I
mean it's it's like a it's about the size of
a school bus and it's like it's being driven around
by a drunk yeah, like auto after he took some
rooms or something, totally spinning uncontrollably through space. It's like
(35:20):
actually one of the more dangerous things up there in
the space debris fields right now. Yeah, So they put
out this call said, who's got a good idea, feel
free to try it on the embasat if if you
want to get close to it. And uh, a group
from Surrey University came up with that removed debris system
where it was basically a ballistic module that attacked this
(35:43):
stuff with a harpoon and a net and pushes or
pulls it out of orbit and basically just kind of
speeds up the process. It's not like they literally drag
it back down to Earth and you know, stand on
it and get their picture taken. But they disrupted enough
to speak, eat up the process that would inevitably happen anyway. Yeah,
it's kind of close to that though, Like there's the
(36:05):
test that they ran in two thousand and eighteen, Like
the net was successful, the harpoon was successful. But then
there it's supposed to also deploy a drag net to
like slow the thing down and then make it, you know,
fall towards Earth. Um. But the drag net didn't didn't go,
but everything else did. Um. And then there was another company,
a Swiss company called clear Space that was working directly
(36:28):
with the ESA to launch clause little clause that go
seek and find um space junk, clamp onto it and
then just basically drag it down and uh, to its
own death. Kind of like you know, the the guy
that you just were you you pushed off the cliff
and he grabbed onto your ankle and then at the
(36:48):
last second he took you down with him, and you
both go. That's what this claw basically does to this
poor space chunk. Yeah. The magnet thing kind of and
we did a show in Magnets and I remember it
kind of broke my brain. But is there such a
thing as a magnet? That when it attracts things. There
to that question, when it attracts things that stick to
(37:12):
the magnet, those things also become magnetized. Oh that's a
great question. It's got it, because you know what I'm
getting at here is basically a magnet that just keeps
growing and growing and growing and just spinning through the universe,
collecting everything in its bath until it's this giant thing. Chuck.
That is the very title of the third album by
Buffalo Space Chunk. It was a long one, not as
(37:34):
long as Fiona Apples, but I think it's second place.
Her new album is great, by the way. I haven't
heard it, but I imagine she's a genius. But I
don't know. It's probably silly idea, or maybe just a
magnet big enough to collect enough stuff and then blow
that thing up, I would guess. I mean, I don't
think it's silly idea. I think magnets probably are the
(37:56):
wave of the future for this stuff because um, harpoons, claws,
all of these things work for say, intact satellites, large ones.
And by the way, the e s A backed off
of its imfacat bounty because it realized very quickly where
many years off from being able to take something that
large out of orbit. Um, but it is, it's still
(38:19):
hurling uncontrollably through space the size of a school bus. Um.
But the the that's still like large pieces that these
things take. And as we said, like smaller debris is
a real real problem up in space. So I could
see it being something like magnets or um whale sharks
(38:39):
filter teeth kind of thing, but up in space that
somehow collects debris in a bag. I don't know exactly,
like yeah, basically like treating it like krill. We need
a we need a robot space shark space whale whale
sharks years ago, of course. Can you imagine ever forgetting
that that was so long ago? Crazy? It really was.
(39:01):
It was a good decade, right, No, it had to be.
I'm just sort of marveling that we're still doing this.
You got a long time left too, So wake up,
I hope. So are you telling me to wake up
for everyone else? Everybody else? Okay? Um, there are also
de orbiting. I mean we have successfully in other companies
(39:22):
have successfully de orbited satellites. It is a thing. We
don't leave everything up there um SpaceX. I remember, you know,
very famously, they have the Falcon rocket that was able
to come back down to Earth and be and docking again.
It was super cool Don doing. Everybody's talking about him
(39:44):
that day too, and he loved it. Yeah, he made
the news. Um. Yeah, so that's actually a new best
practice is basically reuse stuff. Just get it back out,
and even if you can't reuse it again, like SpaceX
does with their boosters, at the very least make part
of launch satellite the um like like de orbiting the
upper stage of the rocket like immediately. There's no reason
(40:06):
to just leave your rocket parts up there anymore. Like
you can you can attach stuff to it, propulsion systems
to get it back down into Earth's atmosphere to burn
up if if you're not going to reuse it. So
that's a definite best practice that's emerging for sure. The
Falcon worked though, right, didn't that thing land safe? Dude?
I saw it with my own eyes. Yeah. I saw
(40:27):
the heavy M boosters land with my own eyes, and
he synchronized them. They came down at the same time,
landed at the same time after launching a rocket in
his face. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean that's really
cool though, and and uh, I gotta hand it to
that guy. He definitely thinks of things that don't see
(40:49):
impossible and somehow is able to make some possible, I know.
And that's I mean, that's another thing too. Like he
just like he there's a lot a lot you can
say about his personality, but some of his problems solving
skills make things seem like so it makes it look
like you turn to everybody else and be like, why
haven't you been doing this this whole time? Too? Like,
for example, is the starship the things can start faring
(41:12):
people the Moon and beyond. Eventually one of its things
is going to be when it comes back down to
Earth is to collect space chunk on the way or
um the Starlink satellite, SpaceX and Starling satellites, they're all
going to be able to autonomously move based on debris
tracking data here on Earth, so they'll just be able
to move themselves. Um. There's just like just basic stuff
(41:36):
that seems like why haven't we been doing this all along?
And I mean it's a it's a good question, you know. Uh,
it's been a while since you've fanboyd on Elon Musk.
I know, I've had some ups and down. Uh. You know,
I mentioned earlier that in seventy eight Skylab fell in
Western Australia, and uh, what we can't do as humans
(41:58):
to say, well, you know fell in the Australian outback.
It's very sparsely populated, so it's all good. Probably there
are people there, and there are ecosystems there, and it
is nature and the planet and it's it is a
big deal. Just because it didn't fall on New York
City or you know, downtown l A or something doesn't
mean it wasn't a problem. It was a problem. And
(42:19):
I think in twenty nineteen um NASA said that as
much as six of that I S S is going
to survive re entry when it eventually comes back down
to Earth. So when you have something like the I
S S whose ultimate fate is up in the air
still literally, um, you you have to plan to deorbit it.
(42:41):
Like you can't just leave something that big up there. Uh,
it's it would just create too much space debris. And
other space stations like the Mirror and China's Tiangong too,
I think one and two space labs both were brought down. Um,
and some of this stuff is going to survive. Like
you said, the space stations, UM, part of that is
(43:02):
going to survive. Some of the Mirror survived, some of
the Tiangong survived, and you don't want that that re
enactment of sky Lab. UM. So they've figured out that
if they crash land these things into like a really
remote part of the ocean, probably it will be fine.
And there's a point in the ocean in the in
the South Pacific Ocean called Point Nemo, and UH, NASA
(43:26):
and the other space agencies have been landing, crash landing
de orbited enormous stuff there for decades. But it wasn't
until that UH survey engineer UH named vourier uh Luca
Tala nice, thank you is Croatian. I believe UM use
(43:48):
this brand new software and triangulated the furthest spot from
land in the world. And he said, it's basically Point Nemo,
this area that this ace agencies have been using already
for decades. They had it basically right on the money. Yeah, So,
I mean it's four miles away from the nearest land mass.
(44:08):
It's supposedly the one point on Earth further away from
any other piece of land. And UH a little fun
tidbit about those that exact degree of longitude and latitude
is that HP Lovecraft wrote about the Old Ones where
the Old Ones live and actually gave coordinates. UM. That
(44:29):
we're really really close to these actual calculated coordinates. UM.
It's kind of great to think about that. But I
also think if you, if you had a good enough
flat map of the Earth, you could probably stand back
in eyeball what looks like it's furthest away from anything,
and you're probably close to Point Nemo, because that's what
(44:50):
NASA did. Yeah, that's basically what they did. And so
this area Point Nemo, I mean, the fact that it's
called Point Nemo makes you think, like, man, they've been
crash landing spacecraft in space Station and there for decades.
This must just be like the most amazing place to
go tour in like a sub. But the thing is,
when you crash land something like space Station, the debris
(45:11):
field that creates is coming into the ocean could be
almost a thousand miles long UM. And it's not like
they hit the target every single time, So it's actually
like a really huge, enormous tens of thousands, if not
millions of square miles wide UM. Area. That's what Point
(45:32):
Nemo is. It's kind of a misnomer, actually, yeah, because
I think people like, when is it going to start poking.
It's a little head above the ocean surface, like a
big stack of junk under there. Pretty cool though, it
is very cool. And also if you're like, well, what
about the fish, do not worry. It turns out the
Point Nemo is one of the least bio diverse parts
(45:53):
of the ocean around. And get this, Chuck, you want
a little cherry on top of our sunday here, I
would love that. I always love the cherry. Invisible has
not done an episode on Point Nemo. In your face,
Mr Mars, that's awesome. There's a recent episode that they
(46:16):
did on the movie theater Megaplex History. That's really great,
of course. I mean it's invisible. Yeah, you got anything else?
I got nothing else? All right? Well, if you want
to know more about space junk, to start reading about it.
There's a lot of really great articles out there. Uh.
And since I said that, it's time for listener mail,
(46:38):
I'm gonna call this what the writer called it. My
husband is jealous of Josh and Chuck. I hope you
guys are both well. I wanted to share with you
the Stuff you Should Know is having in unpleasant effect
on my marriage. You see, my husband works nights, and
while I'm a strong independent person who could hold my
own I still like to have a little background noise
to soothe me to sleep. Most nights, that means falling
(47:00):
asleep to the dulcet tones of maybe how the Black
Panther Party worked, or or a gami uh colin folding goodness.
Every morning, when my husband gets home, he begrudgingly acknowledges
the other men in the room and pauses my app However,
we hit a breaking point recently when he returned to
find the Stuff You Should Know in complete compendium of
(47:20):
mostly interesting things book open on his pillow with me
snuggled against it comfortably. Enraged, he tossed it on the
floor and we exchanged words. So yeah, you could say
my husband is super jelly of Josh and Chuck. All
that to say, here's a big thank you for keeping
me company and helping me, helping this gal sleep tight
every night. Lots of love to my main squeezes ray
(47:44):
she hers from Phoenix, All right, ray um. Hopefully that
was mostly tongue in cheek. I think so, I hope so.
I don't want to be a problem in anybody's marriage,
you know, No, just our own, right. Um, Thanks a lot, Ray,
and sleep tight as always. Hopefully you guys can work
it out. Maybe just get him to read the Stuff
(48:07):
you Should Know a book and he'll be like, no,
I want the book tonight, And that's what your problem.
That's the easiest thing is to convert him exactly. Uh.
And we have ways. You can sign up for our
brainwashing newsletter if you want some tips, that's right. Well,
if you want to get in touch with us like
Ray did, or sign up for our brainwashing newsletter, you
can send us an email send it off to stuff
(48:28):
podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
astro Clark, and there's Charles after Burn, Bryant okay, and
(00:22):
Jerry Goose Roland is out there. Way do you call
me after burning because I'm gassy? Yep, although we've been
we've been tooting for a year straight and no one
even no, I don't care except us. Have you ever
set one of your ducks on fire? Have I ever
lit a fart? I was hoping to not use that word,
(00:43):
but yes, uh yeah, I used to. There was a
period in my youth where I thought that was just
about the funniest thing ever. And I still think it's
pretty hysterical. I just don't do it. I never thought
it was funny. I've always just been more wowed by it.
You know. It's I'm mean, the notion of it, now
as I've gotten older, is more funny than the act itself.
The notion that we can expel flammable cats from our
(01:06):
But it's pretty great. And then do you remember that
cautionary tale that um that if you lit it, it it
could travel up into your rectum and cook your inside
some sort of a reverse thing. There must have just
been like some I don't know, some department somewhere, some
obscure federal agency that was tasked with coming up with
(01:28):
fake cautionary tales to scare kids out of doing things
that where they weren't behaving, you know. Yeah, And I
think what my most cherished memories were the times where
people swore that it wasn't possible, that oh that you
couldn't light it, they wouldn't work. Yeah, So proving proving
that was always sort of the most fun because it
(01:50):
was just like hilarity ensued, and also you just got
to be like in your face, like literally come down here,
because I'm gonna light this in your face if you're
just so sure it's not going to catch fire. And
I always had a theory that it would get rid
of the smell kind of instantaneously too. I think it
just burned it out. I think it did. So it's
really an efficient way of clearing the air. What are
(02:12):
we doing? Well, we're talking chuck about space junk and
actually not the band, the whole thing. What there's a
immediately had to look it up because I was going
to say a great band name, but there's a band
out of Buffalo named space Junk. Yeah, out of Buffalo.
I guess that. I guess that um that affords being mentioned. Sure,
(02:33):
sure um, Okay, So space Junk, not the band, the
actual stuff stuff floating around in space. It turns out
there's a lot of it. And I actually have a
little bit of an intro here. I'm gonna do a little,
um a little. It wasn't the lighting, No, that was
a pre showed tangent. Okay, I think it's that classification.
(02:56):
No UM. Back in the seventies, there is a guy
who worked for NASA called Donald Kessler, and he was
an interesting cat in and of himself, but one of
the claims to fame that he has is that his
name became synonymous with a um an unstoppable chain reaction
(03:16):
of collisions of space junk called the Kessler syndrome. And
the Kessler syndrome that Kessler came up with is based
on this idea that if you get enough stuff floating
around in orbit around Earth, eventually this stuff is going
to smash into other stuff up there because these things
are traveling at very high speeds, and when they smash
(03:37):
in another they're going to potentially break into more and
more pieces, and then those pieces are going to go
on and they're going to smash into other things, and
so this chain reaction will begin to where there's just
pieces constantly smashing into one another, and all of a
sudden were trapped on Earth because we can't make it
through the debris field we accidentally created. Hence the ks
(03:59):
the Kessler sin drome has struck again like a like
a far being lit in your face, but in the
face of humanity as a whole. Yeah, and I think
some some scientists these days say that parts of our
orbit are already like that, right, Yeah, there, Yes, So
Kessler was basically saying he made these predictions in the
seventies um and he he said, based at the rate
(04:21):
that we're going, will probably will reach a critical mass
or in about thirty to forty years. And a lot
of people said, well, we've reached that point, and I
think Kessler is actually right. The thing is, we can't
really see everything that's up there, so we have to
make guesses and assumptions. We actually track a very respectable
amount of space chunk considering that we're just down here
(04:43):
on Earth, that we actually can track things going really
fast that are really small, traveling really far above the Earth.
But there's a lot of it that's just too small
for our current technology to track. So we have to
make guesses about what all is up there. And it
looks like there's a lot of stuff up there, and
it's possible we have reached critical mass and this this
cascading collision, the chain reaction, it just hasn't started yet. Yeah,
(05:08):
I mean, I was just about to correct myself when
I said some people say it's already there, that I
didn't mean. It's all just so people understand it's already
like we can't travel through these places, but that process
has started such that it can't be reversed, Like even
if we stop launching anything, they're like, it's too late. Yeah,
once that chain reaction starts, I mean, there's nothing we
(05:28):
can do about it. I mean, we can't even get
a lot of the space chunk that's up there out now.
I can't imagine when they've started on a chain reaction.
That's got to make catching it even even more difficult.
So a lot of people say, well, let's do everything
we can to avoid that cascade inclusion that Kessler syndrome
from ever starting and a lot of people sitting out
(05:49):
there chuck, I'm guessing are like, wait, what are you
guys talking about with space Chunk? What is the space Chunk? Yes,
I'm well versed with the band from Buffalo. I have
all of their CDs. I got them all for free
just walking past this one street corner many times over
multiple years. But I don't know about the actual space junk.
And it never occurred to me that the band space
(06:10):
Junk is based on a real thing, right, so space
junk I kind of always assume people knew what this was.
But we've made that assumption before about things like I
don't know trees, and people said, why don't you just
grub what a tree is? Parrots? So, oh, by the way,
thanks for all the parrot pictures from all over the world.
(06:31):
Has been delightful. But space junk is you know, it
can be a lot of things. NASA actually has a
sort of a list that describes it better than we could. UM.
A lot of it is abandoned spacecraft or spacecraft that
doesn't work anymore, so we abandon it. Um. This can
be big, full spaceships, or it can be parts of spaceships.
(06:52):
Because as we'll learn and as you know, if you follow,
you know, if you're a rocket enthusiast, like those things
break apart, and we'll get to that, but there are
many pieces that are quite large that are just sort
of left up there until they come back down or
they hit something else. Um. Some of this stuff is,
like I said, parts of rockets that have broken apart,
(07:15):
usually upper stage, because that lower stage stuff breaks off
early enough to where it generally, you know, after a
few years, may tumble back towards Earth, burn up hopefully
so where nothing actually hits Earth, but that upper stage
stuff is kind of stuck up there. Yeah. Yeah, that's
that's one thing that you'll you'll find out about things
that we place into orbit. The further away from Earth
(07:39):
that this thing is circling the Earth, um, the the
longer it's going to take to come back down to Earth.
So that, yeah, because it's the force of gravity that
pulls these things in orbit back down to Earth eventually. Right. Yeah.
What else? Uh? What else do we have? Motor affluent? Yeah,
so a lot of unspent fuel, a lot of cocket fuel,
(08:00):
a solid fuel and then kids, I was looking it up,
that includes ammonium nitrate appropriately enough, but it all yeah,
um and enemy um. But it also includes gunpowder, black gunpowder.
That's what they use as solid rocket fuel sometimes, which
is like we've come really far, but also not far
at all, you know. Um. So there's canisters of of
(08:22):
gunpowder floating around up in space, which are particularly problematic
because not only can they break things apart, they can
really break things apart because they may explode when they
impact things going as fast as they travel. Uh. And
then the last thing, and we'll get to all the
detail about all this stuff and why it's dangerous. But
little bitty, little tiny things, little tiny flex of paint,
(08:43):
even millions of them, can cause a lot of damage.
I think there was, you know, reports from astronauts that say,
you know that work on the Hubble that are like,
this thing looks like it a car that's been through
a hailstorm. You know, it's just like getting constantly pelted,
and you think a speck of paint, who cares. But
(09:03):
when these things are going twenty something miles an hour,
it can cause some damage. Yeah. I think his famous
quote back to ground Control was this thing looks like
a seventy two nova. So when we when we The
thing about space junk is that you have to remember
is every single bit of it used to be here
(09:25):
on Earth, and every single bit of it was launched
by humans. That's just space junk. There's plenty of other
stuff out in space, like asteroids and comets and pieces
of rocks flying around. That's not space. Yeah, et s
flying around, Um, that's not space junk. Space junk is
specifically things that humans have launched into Earth. So there's
this whole kind of air of um oh, I don't
(09:49):
know the actual word for it, but that we've we've
done this to ourselves, like we've created our own problem
and now we we've made this bed that we have
to lie in or figure out how to get out
of because it's so human. Yeah, isn't it that, like
let's destroy the Earth, let's start destroying space because we
may want to live up there, so we might as
(10:10):
well pre destroy it before we get up there to
really destroy it. And it makes sense though early on
in the space programs, you know, starting in the with
the launch of Sputnik, that's when the whole thing started.
But you know, it makes sense that we had the
technology get things up there, but not to get them
back down, and we knew that eventually their their orbit
(10:33):
was going to decay, they would be pulled down into
the atmosphere where it would probably burn up. So that
made sense at the beginning of the space race. But
as we got better and better at technology, the idea
that we could just litter space became less and less acceptable.
The problem is it didn't really go away, Like, there's
(10:54):
still basically stuff that's being launched up there today that
has no way of being brought back down. It's just
like we'll just leave it up there until it runs
out of its useful life and then hope for the best.
That's kind of how a lot of stuff is being
launched into space right now, and it's particularly galling because
we have the technology to bring it back down. It
(11:15):
just makes the whole thing more expensive, and I think
that that's why a lot of um companies and countries
don't include that. Yeah, there's a saying among contractors, a joke,
if you will, among contractors who build houses and fix
up houses. If there's something wrong and that that they're
working on and there's the homeowners and around, they just say,
(11:38):
I can't see it from my house. I've not heard.
That's kind of what's been going on here for years
with I mean not only space agencies, but private companies
as we'll see, uh, Amazon and Tesla and all kinds
of companies have plans to put a lot of a
lot more things into space. And it made me wonder, like,
(11:59):
who's regulating this stuff. We'll get to all that, But
what's kind of cool is since seven when sput Nick
was launched into space, nor AD started cat cataloging this
stuff and numbering them and naming them, and sput Nick
is object number one. And you know they did, they
do a really good job of keeping track of a
(12:19):
lot of this stuff. Like you said, considering we're down
here and it's up there, it's not too bad. Things
started breaking apart though, and getting smaller and colliding with
one another, creating hundreds and thousands of more smaller bits.
But we kind of, you know, our technology progress where
we could go smaller in our tracking abilities. And so
(12:40):
now the US Department of Defense started cattle logging anything
basically larger than I think a softball. I've seen grapefruit too,
so yeah, basically that size. If you're not familiar with softballs,
but you're crazy for citrus. It's grape fruit size too.
If you don't know either one of those, I'm sorry.
That's the best we can do. Maybe two of your
(13:01):
fists bawled up like good and I don't know how
big your fists are A good size snowball. Okay, somebody's like,
I'm from the Tropics, I don't know any of this stuff.
I'm from Buffalo. I know about snowballs and space jumps
and that catalog Chuck. By the way, it is pretty awesome.
It contains not just sput nick and all every satellite
(13:21):
ever created in every grapefruit size UM piece of debris.
But there's some other really interesting stuff in there too. UM.
The cremated remains or the canister containing the cremated remains
of Gene Roddenberry is one of them. The created star
trek UM, the Tesla roadster that UM SpaceX launched up.
(13:43):
That one. Yeah, especially when you start learning about the
space junk, you're like, this is not a good idea. Yeah,
what we don't need to do is just do like
pr stuff in space and then you know, like like
UM astronauts have lost entire boxes of tools on spacewalks
before UM and they're just out there floating around wrenches
(14:04):
and stuff like that. They're all in the catalog. They
cut that stuff tethered. You gotta tether it. Yeah, sometimes
that gets loose or they forget to tether it. Astro nuts.
They have hard days too, that's right. They have their
their B game on some days. But yeah, anything as
small as a softball. They're about twenty thou pieces orbiting
(14:24):
the Earth right now. And then there are about half
a million pieces the size of a marble or larger
that NASA is tracking. And then the paint flex just
good luck with that. There's millions of that and no one,
no one keeps track of it. Yeah, paint flexes, well,
just because we can't. We definitely would if we could,
but we just don't have the technology right now because
(14:45):
there's so so there's three orbits. I don't want to
do an episode on satellites one day, but just briefly,
but there's three orbits lowerth orbit, Middle Earth orbit UM,
not to be confused with the shire and um uh
g O sink in this orbit which is way up
there UM, and that's where your communication satellites are there,
(15:06):
GEO stationary. They basically if you stand in a spot
and could look up and there was a satellite ahead
of you or above, you would be there twenty four
hours a day, every day of the year. It's it's
it's it's moving in in line with one spot around
the Earth, and to do that you have to be
really far out. The stuff that's further closer to the
Earth travels the fastest, and it seems that lower Earth
(15:29):
orbit is the most crowded too. So the things that
are in lower Earth orbit are traveling the fastest, and
there's the most of them because it's the easiest to
get to. Right, I feel like that's a pretty good
setup if you include our two lighting stories. So maybe
we should take a break and talk a little bit
about some of the things they're doing to mitigate this
(15:51):
right after this. All right, So, there's a lot of
(16:22):
space junk out there, a lot of collisions happening. Um.
When satellites collide, like I said, they can create just
a very much bigger problem by creating lots more smaller pieces.
And there are a few countries. The USA is one
of them, China's one, India's one that we have used
missiles before. They're called anti satellite weapons a SATs to
(16:45):
physically damage a satellite, and basically what they do it's
very you know, we all kind of laughed when Armageddon
came out about sending people up there to drill holes
and then drop bombs in it. But when you look
at some of these things that we've thought to do,
they're all kind of rudimentry like that, Like let's just
send something in there and ram it into a satellite. Yeah,
(17:07):
shoot a missile at that thing the old fashioned way. Yeah,
that's called a kinetic kill model, which is it's exactly
that you shoot a missile at a satellite or something
up in space and you blow it into smithereens a
is a yosemite. Sam would say, right, so, um, you
don't want to do this, but a lot of countries do,
like you listed, Um, they have not only just the technology,
(17:31):
but have actually done this, have run these tests. And
I think it's kind of a two show of twofold
Show of Force where you're showing that like I can
launch really technically sophisticated stuff up there that I don't
want anyone else to know about, and then I can
destroy it before you could ever possibly find out about it.
Or I don't like your satellite and what it's doing.
(17:52):
I'm going to shoot that thing out of the sky.
I just showed all of you that I'm capable of
doing it. So so it makes sense, so I guess
in a geopolitical way, but up in space it makes
zero sense because when you blow up a satellite or something,
you blow it up into thousands of pieces of um
that grapefruit, softball snowball size um uh debris, and then
(18:17):
millions of smaller pieces, and all of a sudden, the
population that catalog of space chunk just increased by ten
or fifteen or twenty um depending on how big the
explosion wasn't how much debris it created. Yeah, and you
might think, because there have been satellites launched basically continuously
for you know, many many decades now, that they're banging
(18:39):
into each other at a decent rate. But that's actually
not the case yet as far as actual satellite collisions.
In February two thousand nine, the very first one happened,
um the cosmos with a K, so you know where
that one's from. The twenty Cosmos out of Russia collided
and it was defunct, collided with I think a private
(19:01):
one from a US company called Irridium, which sounds like
a total sci fi movie, bad guy company. I know,
I don't actually know. It doesn't strike me like that.
I get what you're saying, but I think it's a
very pleasant word. Okay. It makes me think of the
rainbow centrum vitamin logo kind of oh, Ridium find it
(19:22):
very Yeah, Well, one guy's evil corporation, there's another guy's
rainbow fighting. That's right. Uh. They were traveling at a
speed relative to each other about twenty two thousand miles
an hour and blew them up into you know, two
thousand pieces at least four inches in diameter, and then
(19:42):
like you said, thousands and thousands and millions of tinier
and tinier pieces. Right. So this is the first time
that was two thousand nine where they where two satellites
rammed into each other as as far as we know,
and I think it hasn't happened again yet right now.
But the thing is is, because there's so many satellites
up there and we're launching so many more, that um
(20:03):
that that it's going to happen again. It's just inevitable
that's going to happen again. Because you'll notice, you know,
while the Iridium satellite was operational, that Cosmos one was
in operational, meaning there's no way to control it or
move it. So the only way to avoid this collision
is for the Iridium controllers to move their's and I
guess they didn't have the warning or what why they
(20:25):
didn't move it, because there's as we'll see, there's a
there's collision maneuvers where you just basically move your satellite
out of the way if you think it's gonna gonna
hit something. But that didn't happen with this one. And
so because there's so many satellites that are defunct out
there that are traveling in opposite directions that really high speeds,
of course this is going to happen again. And the
(20:47):
Union of Concerned Scientists says that there's something like thirty
three I know they're great, UM thirty three hundred and
seventy two active satellites in orbit and at least three
thousand and more inactive satellites in orbit right now, So
it's definitely going to happen again. Yeah, I think the
Union of Concerned Scientists logo is I looked it up.
(21:10):
It's just UM a silhouette of two uh folded arms
with lab coat sleeves, scowling scowling arms. So yeah, it's
gonna happen again. I think there was one ESA official,
the European Space Agency, and this is paraphrasing, but said,
it's basically what we're doing. It's like every time a
(21:32):
ship goes out to see just leaving it out there,
like eventually this is going to be a real problem.
And I know that it's hard to imagine because it's
in space, but let me liken it to the ocean
and boats and it might get the your thick skulls. Yeah, um,
so yeah, it's it's basically a tragedy of the commons
that we're seeing right now. Um, but the commons are
(21:53):
becoming more and more crowded as the days go by.
That thirty three and seventy two active satellites in orbit,
I think that as of the beginning of the end
of that was a thousand more active satellites than there
were in two thousand nineteen, like exponentially. And one of
the reasons why it's picking up exponentially is that, um,
(22:15):
a lot of companies. I think there's at least eight
companies right now that have proposals to release um what
you're called mega constellations or swarms of satellites, and you
would you would need a swarm of satellites because these
things in lower Earth orbit travel so fast that if say,
like you're connected to one for your cell phone, it's
suddenly gone. So they handed off to the satellite behind
(22:37):
them and behind them and behind them, so that you'd
be continuous service. So the more of swarm of satellites
you have, the more connected you could be. And so
some of these proposals like um SpaceX is starlink swarm UM.
It aims to to create like global coverage of satellite
internet service, so everyone everywhere in the world will be
(22:59):
able to connect to really high speed WiFi because of
this swarm. So there's a benefit to it. But at
the same time, the SpaceX constellation requires twelve thousand satellites.
There's only called the swarm. There's only thirty three hundred
up there right now, and Elon Musk is saying that
he's going to add another twelve thousand just with his swarm.
(23:20):
So all of these satellites that are going up in
our in the process of going up, are about to
make the whole thing a lot more crowded. So yes,
the likelihood of a collision just is increasing, um by
by orders of magnitude every year from what I can tell. Yeah,
and you know, obviously one of the big risks here,
(23:41):
and we'll talk about all of them. Something falling on
to Earth and hurting people is one of the smaller risks,
even though that has happened when sky Lab very famously
fell out in the Western Australian outback. Um, but we'll
get to that. But that that's not the biggest risk.
The biggest risk is for for damage and collisions up there.
(24:02):
And we've got a lot of astronauts up there, we
have people living on space stations, we have people working
on that Hubble telescope. I mean, what't that was the
movie Gravity, right? That was space junk that caused their
whole thing, right, Yeah, they basically depicted a Kessler syndrome
chain reaction. Um, I guess the localized one in that
movie from from I had totally forgotten about it, but
(24:23):
I kept seeing references to it, so yeah, I kind
of remember it now, Like in that why she had
to take shelter somewhere with the ghost of George Clooney. Hey,
who wouldn't though, you know, did he even exist in
that movie? I don't remember. Yeah, is there a theory
that he was not real? No, I just didn't remember
if like he if like at the end they were
(24:44):
like and he never really existed, So he was there.
She was just remembering him later or imagining him there
later on, right, I think so? I mean I only
saw that once. Same here. Yeah. But Um, even stuff
like we said, as small as a paint flack, if
going twenty two thousand miles an hour, one centimeter paint
fleck can inflict enough damage as a or the same
(25:08):
amount as a five dred and fifty pound object going
about sixty miles an hour here on Earth. And if
that goes up to ten centimeters, it would be comparable
to a seven kilogram TNT blast paint flex paint fleck.
Marble's pretty amazing stuff if you think about it. Um.
And actually they've had to replace windows on the Space
(25:30):
Shuttle back when the Space Shuttle was in operation in
the US. UM, and they they there just be like
deep gouges and streaks um taken out of the windows.
And when they would analyze and they'd be like, that's
paint paint fleck did that. Yeah, And you know the
I S S And a lot of our work happens
(25:50):
below where most of this stuff is. But it's still
a danger. It is a danger. So one of the
reasons why it's a dangerous because again, um, the the
I S S is it. It's two hundred and fifty
miles above Earth, four hundred and three kilometers above the
surfaces in lower Earth orbit UM. But it is one
of the most vital pieces of space technology that's up
(26:12):
there right now. UM. So we want to protect it.
We want to keep the I S S safe. UM.
The problem is is that there's a lot of stuff
above it, and when that stuff eventually comes back down
to Earth, it might pass by the I s's coming down,
and then the stuff that's also in lower Earth orbit
around the I S S could run into it from
(26:33):
the side or from the opposite direction UM, or like
at a ninety degree plane. So the I S S
is constantly under threat. And NASA's UM and I think
the E s A. A bunch of different agencies that
use the I S S have come up with procedures
for basically moving it if if there's a high enough
chance that that a collision will occur. And when we
(26:55):
talk about high enough chance, we're saying, like one in
a hundred thousand chants is enough reason to move the
I S. S out of the way. Yeah, And they
came up with a pretty um I mean, it seems
pretty obvious, but it's a pretty smart way to determine
if it's dangerous or not. They said, we need to
get an area around these things where we can determine
(27:18):
if it's you know, basically a close call or not.
And we're gonna call it the pizza box because that's
what it looks like. And everybody loves pizza. Everyone knows
what pizzas. Do we have to describe that? Please? No,
we have an episode on pizza, so go listen to.
There's some guy eating a grapefruit. Is like, never heard
of pizza. But it's shaped like a pizza box, is
(27:38):
flat and it's rectangular. Uh, it's about thirty miles across,
a mile deep, thirty miles long. And the idea is that,
you know, imagine the I. S. S or whatever important
satellite in the middle of this pizza box in space.
And they say, if anything, if we predict anything will
come within the bounds of that pizza box, then that
(28:00):
means that we have to get together and and decide
what to do, at least not necessarily take the action,
because then you've got to determine the probability of collision.
But that's when it gets their attention, I think, right.
So if they figure out that there's a one and
a hundred thousand chants of UM of collision and moving
the I S S isn't going to just be like, well,
(28:22):
the mission scrap now because we needed the I S
S three ft to the left, um, and now we
can't do anything, so just forget it, just forget the
whole thing. Um. They will move the I S S.
If there's a one in ten thousand chance of collision
um and it won't jeopardize the lives of the crew,
then they'll move the I S S. Mission be damned, Um,
(28:45):
they don't take that lightly. And then one other thing
they might do if they don't have time to move
the I S S, they'll put the crew into whatever
capsule brought them there. If the soy Use rocket that
that brought them there is docked, or if one of
SpaceX is Dragon capsules is docked. They'll they'll say, go
(29:06):
in there and hang out until this this uh predicted
m collision passes, but hang out there like it's like
a lifeboat basically. Form. Yeah, that's the one. The only
one that confused me a little bit. I mean, I
get the idea that that's a a good idea to
be sort of in the escape pod, but that escape
pod can also be crashed as well. Yes, good thinking.
(29:27):
You would make a very fine NASA flight engineer. Because, um,
I was reading an account of Scott Kelly, one of
the Kelly twins, the astronauts who are just so great. Um,
Scott Kelly was up on the I s s once
as a commander. I think when you're spending that year
in space, and um, there was a predicted collision that
(29:47):
was enough to tell them to go sit in the
Sayers rocket And they said, but don't close the hatch
because it's possible that the the capsule could get hit
and you might need to get out of the capsule
really quick too. But then you know, if the I
Sess this hit, you can close the hatch very quickly
and and um disembark. I guess, so, yes, yeah, I
wonder if they like, they did that for the very
(30:11):
first time. They said, just go get in the escape pod.
I'm simplifying things of course for Star Wars fans. And
they go get in the space pod and close the
door and they go they go, all right, we're all
good now, right, And then they look at each other
and they're like, not really, yeah, that it was were
just in another thing. It was an interesting account they were.
They were just kind of he said, it was a
little tense. But then the time the predicted time of
(30:34):
collision came and went, and you know, they were finally like, okay,
can we can we get out now? But he said
it was a little a little like it was very
quiet and they could just hear themselves in one another breathing,
and that was about it. But I mean, this dangerous
work and they understand this. But the goal is to
bring them all back always. But you know, when you
go into you know, it's like being a fire firefighter
(30:54):
or something. You know that there's a risk that you
might not come back. There's gotta be oh yeah, for sure.
I just want that to be as minimal as possible. Yes,
And they take extraordinary measures to make sure that that
it's as minimized as possible for sure. Should we take
another break? I think so, man, and we're going to
come back and talk about what to do about this
(31:15):
space junk problem. Okay, So, um, we I think have
(31:47):
established that space junk is kind of a problem, and
not just for the I S S, not just for satellites.
I think one thing we kind of left out is
if these satellites, you know, crash into each other, there's
somebody's dish TV gone, how are you gonna watch? Are
you gonna watch the Big Game? Then you're not. So
space chunk affects US one and all, um, and there's
all sorts of other things that could happen. Um, if
(32:10):
our satellites start going out, it's not something we want.
We also don't want the crew of the I S
S to get hurt. But also eventually in the future
when we go back to the Moon and then when
we travel beyond the Moon, um, we're gonna be needing
to go in and out of Earth's orbit and we
don't want there to be some crazy to brief field
that we have to navigate around or wait to pass
(32:31):
or whatever. So this is something we need to to
mitigate right now, and it is just beginning to be
something that um, some of the space agencies, not all
unfortunately in some countries, and some companies are starting to
take seriously and figure out how to mitigate. Yeah, I
mean think about space tourism and on these companies, they're like, hey,
(32:52):
how'd you like to fly up there for a hundred
thousand dollars and risk being plowed into by paint flex
Right a paint fl being taken out by a paint
flight is just undignified. Uh So the u N gets
involved a little bit and they say, hey, how about everyone,
all you companies sending satellites up there, why don't you
(33:13):
promise to remove these things at least twenty five years
after the end of their mission. And everyone said, sure,
we'll do that. U N. Um, how are you going
to enforce that? And the un says, I don't know,
we're asking nicely, though, all the space agencies kind of
slowly encircled the u N and then grabbed it and
(33:34):
gave it a wedgie. But people, I'm kind of joking,
But people in these agencies they do know it's a
problem they and they are coming up with things kind
of Armageddon style. I mean literally space Next is it
with you in that movie? I just always thought it
was the dumbest thing, Like, how am I supposed to
believe this? That this is how they're gonna solve this
(33:56):
problem by just blowing this thing up by drilling holes
in it and putting bombs in it. And then the
more I read about stuff like this, the more I
think that's an actual idea that they could do. Yeah. Yeah,
I mean we're like maybe a decade off from space mining,
I would guess, like mining asteroids. I just I feel like, uh,
I don't want to give Michael Bay credit for coming
(34:18):
up with a plausible thing, because I just still want
to say he's ridiculous. But it's not because they have
space nets and they have space harpoons and space magnets
and these are some of the things that they actually
use to drag these things, uh close enough to where
it falls out of orbit and then ideally burns up. Yeah,
(34:38):
like removed debris, right, yeah, removed debris was it was
kind of cool. The European Space Agency said, you know what,
we have this defunct satellite up there called the Vistat,
and why don't we just put a bounty on this
thing to see what people can come up with and
just say, you know, go hog wild and see what
(34:59):
you can see what you and do. Bruce Willis, Yeah,
you gotta tell them about Embasat and what it is
and what it's doing right now through space. Well, I
mean it's it's like a it's about the size of
a school bus and it's like it's being driven around
by a drunk yeah, like auto after he took some
rooms or something, totally spinning uncontrollably through space. It's like
(35:20):
actually one of the more dangerous things up there in
the space debris fields right now. Yeah, So they put
out this call said, who's got a good idea, feel
free to try it on the embasat if if you
want to get close to it. And uh, a group
from Surrey University came up with that removed debris system
where it was basically a ballistic module that attacked this
(35:43):
stuff with a harpoon and a net and pushes or
pulls it out of orbit and basically just kind of
speeds up the process. It's not like they literally drag
it back down to Earth and you know, stand on
it and get their picture taken. But they disrupted enough
to speak, eat up the process that would inevitably happen anyway. Yeah,
it's kind of close to that though, Like there's the
(36:05):
test that they ran in two thousand and eighteen, Like
the net was successful, the harpoon was successful. But then
there it's supposed to also deploy a drag net to
like slow the thing down and then make it, you know,
fall towards Earth. Um. But the drag net didn't didn't go,
but everything else did. Um. And then there was another company,
a Swiss company called clear Space that was working directly
(36:28):
with the ESA to launch clause little clause that go
seek and find um space junk, clamp onto it and
then just basically drag it down and uh, to its
own death. Kind of like you know, the the guy
that you just were you you pushed off the cliff
and he grabbed onto your ankle and then at the
(36:48):
last second he took you down with him, and you
both go. That's what this claw basically does to this
poor space chunk. Yeah. The magnet thing kind of and
we did a show in Magnets and I remember it
kind of broke my brain. But is there such a
thing as a magnet? That when it attracts things. There
to that question, when it attracts things that stick to
(37:12):
the magnet, those things also become magnetized. Oh that's a
great question. It's got it, because you know what I'm
getting at here is basically a magnet that just keeps
growing and growing and growing and just spinning through the universe,
collecting everything in its bath until it's this giant thing. Chuck.
That is the very title of the third album by
Buffalo Space Chunk. It was a long one, not as
(37:34):
long as Fiona Apples, but I think it's second place.
Her new album is great, by the way. I haven't
heard it, but I imagine she's a genius. But I
don't know. It's probably silly idea, or maybe just a
magnet big enough to collect enough stuff and then blow
that thing up, I would guess. I mean, I don't
think it's silly idea. I think magnets probably are the
(37:56):
wave of the future for this stuff because um, harpoons, claws,
all of these things work for say, intact satellites, large ones.
And by the way, the e s A backed off
of its imfacat bounty because it realized very quickly where
many years off from being able to take something that
large out of orbit. Um, but it is, it's still
(38:19):
hurling uncontrollably through space the size of a school bus. Um.
But the the that's still like large pieces that these
things take. And as we said, like smaller debris is
a real real problem up in space. So I could
see it being something like magnets or um whale sharks
(38:39):
filter teeth kind of thing, but up in space that
somehow collects debris in a bag. I don't know exactly,
like yeah, basically like treating it like krill. We need
a we need a robot space shark space whale whale
sharks years ago, of course. Can you imagine ever forgetting
that that was so long ago? Crazy? It really was.
(39:01):
It was a good decade, right, No, it had to be.
I'm just sort of marveling that we're still doing this.
You got a long time left too, So wake up,
I hope. So are you telling me to wake up
for everyone else? Everybody else? Okay? Um, there are also
de orbiting. I mean we have successfully in other companies
(39:22):
have successfully de orbited satellites. It is a thing. We
don't leave everything up there um SpaceX. I remember, you know,
very famously, they have the Falcon rocket that was able
to come back down to Earth and be and docking again.
It was super cool Don doing. Everybody's talking about him
(39:44):
that day too, and he loved it. Yeah, he made
the news. Um. Yeah, so that's actually a new best
practice is basically reuse stuff. Just get it back out,
and even if you can't reuse it again, like SpaceX
does with their boosters, at the very least make part
of launch satellite the um like like de orbiting the
upper stage of the rocket like immediately. There's no reason
(40:06):
to just leave your rocket parts up there anymore. Like
you can you can attach stuff to it, propulsion systems
to get it back down into Earth's atmosphere to burn
up if if you're not going to reuse it. So
that's a definite best practice that's emerging for sure. The
Falcon worked though, right, didn't that thing land safe? Dude?
I saw it with my own eyes. Yeah. I saw
(40:27):
the heavy M boosters land with my own eyes, and
he synchronized them. They came down at the same time,
landed at the same time after launching a rocket in
his face. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean that's really
cool though, and and uh, I gotta hand it to
that guy. He definitely thinks of things that don't see
(40:49):
impossible and somehow is able to make some possible, I know.
And that's I mean, that's another thing too. Like he
just like he there's a lot a lot you can
say about his personality, but some of his problems solving
skills make things seem like so it makes it look
like you turn to everybody else and be like, why
haven't you been doing this this whole time? Too? Like,
for example, is the starship the things can start faring
(41:12):
people the Moon and beyond. Eventually one of its things
is going to be when it comes back down to
Earth is to collect space chunk on the way or
um the Starlink satellite, SpaceX and Starling satellites, they're all
going to be able to autonomously move based on debris
tracking data here on Earth, so they'll just be able
to move themselves. Um. There's just like just basic stuff
(41:36):
that seems like why haven't we been doing this all along?
And I mean it's a it's a good question, you know. Uh,
it's been a while since you've fanboyd on Elon Musk.
I know, I've had some ups and down. Uh. You know,
I mentioned earlier that in seventy eight Skylab fell in
Western Australia, and uh, what we can't do as humans
(41:58):
to say, well, you know fell in the Australian outback.
It's very sparsely populated, so it's all good. Probably there
are people there, and there are ecosystems there, and it
is nature and the planet and it's it is a
big deal. Just because it didn't fall on New York
City or you know, downtown l A or something doesn't
mean it wasn't a problem. It was a problem. And
(42:19):
I think in twenty nineteen um NASA said that as
much as six of that I S S is going
to survive re entry when it eventually comes back down
to Earth. So when you have something like the I
S S whose ultimate fate is up in the air
still literally, um, you you have to plan to deorbit it.
(42:41):
Like you can't just leave something that big up there. Uh,
it's it would just create too much space debris. And
other space stations like the Mirror and China's Tiangong too,
I think one and two space labs both were brought down. Um,
and some of this stuff is going to survive. Like
you said, the space stations, UM, part of that is
(43:02):
going to survive. Some of the Mirror survived, some of
the Tiangong survived, and you don't want that that re
enactment of sky Lab. UM. So they've figured out that
if they crash land these things into like a really
remote part of the ocean, probably it will be fine.
And there's a point in the ocean in the in
the South Pacific Ocean called Point Nemo, and UH, NASA
(43:26):
and the other space agencies have been landing, crash landing
de orbited enormous stuff there for decades. But it wasn't
until that UH survey engineer UH named vourier uh Luca
Tala nice, thank you is Croatian. I believe UM use
(43:48):
this brand new software and triangulated the furthest spot from
land in the world. And he said, it's basically Point Nemo,
this area that this ace agencies have been using already
for decades. They had it basically right on the money. Yeah, So,
I mean it's four miles away from the nearest land mass.
(44:08):
It's supposedly the one point on Earth further away from
any other piece of land. And UH a little fun
tidbit about those that exact degree of longitude and latitude
is that HP Lovecraft wrote about the Old Ones where
the Old Ones live and actually gave coordinates. UM. That
(44:29):
we're really really close to these actual calculated coordinates. UM.
It's kind of great to think about that. But I
also think if you, if you had a good enough
flat map of the Earth, you could probably stand back
in eyeball what looks like it's furthest away from anything,
and you're probably close to Point Nemo, because that's what
(44:50):
NASA did. Yeah, that's basically what they did. And so
this area Point Nemo, I mean, the fact that it's
called Point Nemo makes you think, like, man, they've been
crash landing spacecraft in space Station and there for decades.
This must just be like the most amazing place to
go tour in like a sub. But the thing is,
when you crash land something like space Station, the debris
(45:11):
field that creates is coming into the ocean could be
almost a thousand miles long UM. And it's not like
they hit the target every single time, So it's actually
like a really huge, enormous tens of thousands, if not
millions of square miles wide UM. Area. That's what Point
(45:32):
Nemo is. It's kind of a misnomer, actually, yeah, because
I think people like, when is it going to start poking.
It's a little head above the ocean surface, like a
big stack of junk under there. Pretty cool though, it
is very cool. And also if you're like, well, what
about the fish, do not worry. It turns out the
Point Nemo is one of the least bio diverse parts
(45:53):
of the ocean around. And get this, Chuck, you want
a little cherry on top of our sunday here, I
would love that. I always love the cherry. Invisible has
not done an episode on Point Nemo. In your face,
Mr Mars, that's awesome. There's a recent episode that they
(46:16):
did on the movie theater Megaplex History. That's really great,
of course. I mean it's invisible. Yeah, you got anything else?
I got nothing else? All right? Well, if you want
to know more about space junk, to start reading about it.
There's a lot of really great articles out there. Uh.
And since I said that, it's time for listener mail,
(46:38):
I'm gonna call this what the writer called it. My
husband is jealous of Josh and Chuck. I hope you
guys are both well. I wanted to share with you
the Stuff you Should Know is having in unpleasant effect
on my marriage. You see, my husband works nights, and
while I'm a strong independent person who could hold my
own I still like to have a little background noise
to soothe me to sleep. Most nights, that means falling
(47:00):
asleep to the dulcet tones of maybe how the Black
Panther Party worked, or or a gami uh colin folding goodness.
Every morning, when my husband gets home, he begrudgingly acknowledges
the other men in the room and pauses my app However,
we hit a breaking point recently when he returned to
find the Stuff You Should Know in complete compendium of
(47:20):
mostly interesting things book open on his pillow with me
snuggled against it comfortably. Enraged, he tossed it on the
floor and we exchanged words. So yeah, you could say
my husband is super jelly of Josh and Chuck. All
that to say, here's a big thank you for keeping
me company and helping me, helping this gal sleep tight
every night. Lots of love to my main squeezes ray
(47:44):
she hers from Phoenix, All right, ray um. Hopefully that
was mostly tongue in cheek. I think so, I hope so.
I don't want to be a problem in anybody's marriage,
you know, No, just our own, right. Um, Thanks a lot, Ray,
and sleep tight as always. Hopefully you guys can work
it out. Maybe just get him to read the Stuff
(48:07):
you Should Know a book and he'll be like, no,
I want the book tonight, And that's what your problem.
That's the easiest thing is to convert him exactly. Uh.
And we have ways. You can sign up for our
brainwashing newsletter if you want some tips, that's right. Well,
if you want to get in touch with us like
Ray did, or sign up for our brainwashing newsletter, you
can send us an email send it off to stuff
(48:28):
podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
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