Space Junk in the Trunk

How much junk can we accumulate in Earth's orbit before we seal off our world? Before we cut the planet off from the cosmos and doom civilization to a new dark age? In this episode, Robert and Julie look skyward to space exploration's garbage.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and my name is Julie Douglas. Julie,
you've been camping before, right, Yes, I have. So you
know the deal. Leave no trades, right, leave nothing behind
you bringing all your stuff, whether you're bringing in a

(00:23):
backpack or a whole truckload of camping equipment, you need
to leave with only your thing, taking only memories with you,
and leaving no litter behind, right, I mean, that's that's
the way it works. You don't just bury all your
pots and pants and then market Well yeah, well, I mean, okay,
if you're coming back at the same camping place, maybe

(00:44):
you could make that argument. But okay, I see, I
see a concept that you're coming up here. But the
whole idea is that we want to be able to
come back to that place and enjoy it in its
natural form without having to put up with a bunch
of litter and a bunch of garbage changing that environment. Now,
we generinally don't have to worry though about that potter
pan that Julie left behind at the campsite. Traveling at

(01:05):
immense speeds like five miles per second and smashing through
my crania right, clocking us in the head. I mean,
that's just not a problem here at our campsites on Earth.
But out there in the in the wild yonder it
is a problem, right, which is directly tied to this
idea of this big sky theory. Right, right, the big
sky theory. I mean, the answer is in the words there,

(01:26):
big sky. There's a lot of sky, There's a lot
of space. It's huge. We couldn't possibly litter enough to
make space junk a problem, right, That was the old
way of looking at If you have a space mission
to go up there, solar panel floats off, no big deal,
there's plenty of room, some nuts and bolts fought in
the pockets, no big deal. Satellites dead, and I just
leave it there. This big sky theory, we can we

(01:46):
can just leave everything wherever it happens to die and
it'll never be a problem. It'll never come home to roost,
this problem of space junk. Uh. But it is a
problem that has come home to roost. NASA has tracked
around on sixteen thousand bits of debris. That's a lot
measuring over ten sent meters about four inches, but there

(02:07):
are millions of smaller bits and pieces that are thought
to be swarming up in the cosmos. And the more
we've involved ourselves in orbit and an owner space, the
more stuff we wind up with up there. Like just
to look at sort of the timeline for this, if
we look back at two thousand and five, we had
a catalog of debris up there somewhere in the neighborhood
of ten thousand pieces, and that's just stuff that we

(02:28):
were tracking in New off Specifically, by two thousand ten,
that number had reached fifteen thousand, so it's risen by
five thousand pieces of space junk. And just that short
amount of time, and fast forward to today, you have
more and more players in the space game, involving themselves
in the space game and taking that the big sky
approach to space exploration. Well, especially when you get into

(02:51):
the privatized territory as well, right, this becomes a real issue.
The other issue is that space junk travels at speeds
up to seventeen thousand, five hundred miles per hour, So
that's fast enough for a tiny piece of debris to
damage a satellite or spacecraft it's really big concerned or
the International Space Station, which we will talk about later,

(03:12):
can finentially set up a chain reaction where you have
one pieces suddenly crashing into another and which causes debris
to spiral out from that to hit other pieces. In
many cases we're talking about dead objects hitting other pieces
of garbage. But then what happens when this stuff collides
with operative telecommunication satellites or exploratory missions or manned missions.

(03:32):
You can see where this becomes a very dangerous problem
very quickly. That's something called cascading collisions. This idea that
things are slamming into each other and just creating more
and more and more debris. So this has come home
to roost. And let's talk about back in the day.
Back in the seventies when this was just a theory,
and a guy named Donald Kessler, who was assigned to

(03:53):
the Environmental Effects Project Office at NASA's Johnson Space Center
in Houston, became very interested in the craft that was
abandoned and the void. Yeah, he wrote an important paper
at the time. It's become more important over time. Originally
he was having to really sort of shot on the
mountain to get people to listen to him, But he
wrote a paper called Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites the

(04:14):
Creation of a good rebelt, and his argument was that
if we and this is early on, everyone else's seems
to be sticking to this big sky theory. But Kessler says, look,
if we don't start controlling this now, if we don't
start mitigating the problem now, we are going to reach
a point where we basically have a belt of debris

(04:34):
around the planet. If you've ever seen the movie Wally,
the depictions of Earth in that which the Earth is
just so crowded with satellites that for anything to enter
or exit Or's atmosphere they have to sort of move
things out of the way. That's basically what he's talking about,
except in his scenario, we reach a point with that
to where we are stranded on Earth. Basically we are
suddenly limited by what we can do and what we

(04:56):
can explore in space. We kind of dig our own grave,
you will, by just clotting our atmosphere with all of
this junk. Yeah yeah, well not our atmosphere, but our uproar,
right right, I mean, it does constrain our ability to
explore the universe because it's kind of hard to launch
something and then know that it's going to be taken
out by a story piece of space junk. But he

(05:17):
was basically saying, look, I estimate this to happen in
the thirty to forty years. Now. This was alarming. It
really was an eye opener. Even though people like our
thirsty Clark, who actually conceived a communication satellite, had talked
about this in the forties, I believe it was really
Kessler who spent the time looking out at the Cosmos
and looking through his telescope and saying, Okay, guys, this
is this is real polity. This is a bigger problem

(05:39):
than we thought. His vision of it was very apocular.
Who was who's talking about like a new dark Age?
Oh yeah he was. Yeah. He was actually saying that
it would take a civilization down to the studs. Yeah,
you know, he's fictioning it up a little bit, but
maybe not too much. You know, that is the idea
extrapolated to the denth degree. Right, you can take down
on the communication satellites and you know, all this sort
of technology that we do with today and our life

(06:01):
is predicated on, and you could really sort of fold
up humanity in the sense. But but we're we're not there.
I do want to say that NASA set up the
Orbital Debris Program Office in response to Cussler's paper, but
I'm not gonna say it's a two. It was a
toothless organization, but it wasn't It was didn't really seem
like a big concern. It's like, oh, yeah, this could happen,

(06:21):
and it's a theory, let's set a committee and uh,
I mean you know how that yeah, yeah, and the
guidelines they didn't really help to actually reduce space waste.
So here we are, thirty years later, right on time,
two thousand and nine, we have a couple of events
that really usher in this idea that Kessler didn't just

(06:44):
have a theory. It is a syndrome. And that's why
it's called custlers. Yeah. February ten, two thousand nine, we
had two satellites, Iridium thirty three, which is flying north
relaying a phone conversations. And then there was this long
retired Russian communication satellite called Cosmos and it's just tumbling
east and an uncontrolled orbit. So you have an active

(07:04):
satellite and an inactive satellite and then they collide. And
this was not even a collision that was on the
forecast because at this time we knew some of the
stuff that was going on there and we can sort
of excrapolate what might run into what what time. But
this wasn't even scheduled to happen, if you will. They
just ram into each other and of course just completely
annihilate each other, and they create all these other pieces

(07:25):
of debris. Right, they smashed into something like a two
thousand one pieces. And this is over the Siberian tundra.
And although it doesn't really affect us too much, I
mean I think there's some drop calls from this one collision. Right,
the fact of the matter is, again, this debris, this
cloud of debris was created, and we know that that
begets even more and more debris. And it was a

(07:46):
big wake up call. And according to wire dot com
Evan L. Schwartz great article in this he said that
each chard an orbiting cannonball capable of destroying yet another
hunk of high priced hardware. That's the real problem there, Yeah,
I mean expense going into any of these satellites, communications
or otherwise. So the idea that you just have junk
up there that could conceivably just wipe it out. People

(08:09):
suddenly started taking even more notice following this two thousand
and nine event. Yep, So pretty soon in a military
unit called the Space Surveillance Network was set up. They
began to monitor the debris by They were looking at
one thousand active satellites, three thousand, seven hundred inactive satellites
and rocket pieces, and another fifteen thousand, three hundred objects
the size of a fist or larger. And these numbers

(08:32):
started to bear out this idea that we could have
maybe seventy five collisions a day, and that doesn't include
the half million smaller pieces of debris the size of
a marble or larger, all of which is again capable
of just wiping out satellites or you know, other things
that are very valuable to us. Another key incident that happened,
and this is just a few months after the Cosmos

(08:52):
Iridium collision, and I think I imagine most of you
remember this. I remember it because working here at how
stuff works and anything news the inside I see that happens.
We suddenly latch onto a bit and this was big
news because two thousand nine, suddenly there's an object, piece
of space junk headed towards the International Space Station. So
this is an immensely expensive piece of equipment here. We're

(09:13):
talking in excess of a hundred billion dollars worth of equipment,
human beings on board, a lot invested in this. This
is part of our space legacy moving forward. And there's
a piece of junk headed towards it that could conceivably
white it all out. So we have to rush everybody
on board into essentially a lifeboat kind of a panic room,
right yeah, because they're like, all right, we might miss us,

(09:35):
but it might hit you, and if it hits us,
we're gonna have to somehow save you, guys. So get
into this lifeboat and want to see what happens. Now,
Luckily it missed by a few miles, but it's still
in the vasts of space. I mean, that's like shaving
off a little piece of hair on your head there.
And it was like a couple of months after that,
another piece of space junk hurled towards the International Space Station,

(09:56):
this time missing them by just a mile. And this
frag meant would have had an impact equal to a
truck bomb. In fact, I've got a quote here from
Jack Bacon, he's a senior NASA scientist. He says, a
ten centimeter sphere of aluminum would be like seven kilograms
of T and T it would blow everything to smith rings.
I mean, we can shield these things to a certain degree.
There's a project at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston

(10:18):
where they basically take chunks of plastic and basically space
junk and they just fire them at shields and panels
to see exactly what the damages. And they're able to determine.
Within a certain size of space junk, they can sort
of shield something out. But when you're getting these larger pieces,
it becomes increasingly impossible to create a space vessel or

(10:38):
a satellite. They could withstand that kind of damage, right, right,
especially when you're talking about delicate of material such as
solar of cells. Yeah, and just to give everybody an
idea too, I mean we're talking again. I think you
talked about this, some tools or some nuts and bolts,
that kind of space junk to the size of rocket stages,
the size of school buses. There's an immense variety of

(11:00):
based junk up there. Now. One might ask doesn't all
this stuff eventually just fall into the Earth's atmosphere and
burn up, because that was part of the big sky
theory as well, that all right, if we'll leave something
up there, it's not gonna be a problem. And b
it's eventually just going to drift down and re enter
the Earth atmosphere and probably burn up and or land
in the middle of nowhere or more likely in the
middle of the ocean somewhere, which is what most reinering does. Occasionally,

(11:24):
something will fall on somebody's backyard and it's a local
news story, front page for the next five years. But
for the most part, yes, that's true, it just falls
in the middle of nowhere. But it can take decades
for something in orbit to actually re enter the atmosphere,
which is why you still have some of the original
satellites that went up there. I mean, they're all still
up there and again, and not all of them burn

(11:46):
up upon re entry, right, because it depends on the size, right, Right,
depends on the size of rocket stage. The size of
school bus isn't necessarily going to burn up there. So
we're gonna take a quick break and when we get back,
we're going to talk about this idea of how we
can in teen space junk and getting our janitorial services
up there and taking care of it. All Right, we're back.

(12:10):
I want to throw out another quick fact. This is
from the Wired article you mentioned earlier. But nineteen sixty
two that's when the kel Star one satellite relaid the
first phone call and TV signals across the Atlantic and
ended up failing the next year. So nine three this
thing dies. It's still up there, just up there doing nothing,
just a big piece of space junk floating around. And

(12:31):
and in the decades since, of course, we've rolled out
more and more stuff. Just to give you a little
idea about how we end up with that huge number
of fifteen thousand plot well, now it's up to sixteen
thousand pieces of space jump. Yeah. I mean it's really
hard to actually keep tabs on anyway, because, as we
talked about, it's you know, you have some particles that
are so small that you can't even really engage them
or track them. I should say. Another incident that kind

(12:52):
of woke everyone up to the dangers and the problems
posted by space Junk of January eleven, two thousand seven,
the Chinese government stayed this demonstration of its military might
by basically shooting down or not really shooting down, but
blowing up one of its retired satellites with something called
a kinetic kill vehicle, so to demonstrate that they had
the potential to take out a satellite, which in a
military scenario would be very valuable if you satellite our

(13:15):
keys to tall communication networks, to our ability to get
strategic information about what an enemy is doing. And they
were demonstrating, yes, we can take these out satellite killing technology.
I mean, that's that's been on the military playlist for
some time now. But they demonstrate this. They blow up
this old satellite. Big deal, right, They're just shooting some
junk in the backyard. There are people out in the

(13:36):
sticks that do that every day. But when they shot
this thing, it blasted into three thousand trackable pieces. That's
just trackable pieces, but three thousands. So one military demonstration later,
that number we have that tally of measurable space junk
up there rises by three thousand pieces. Yeah, I mean
it was a total jerk move. I mean it's really irresponsible,
knowing what we know to a certain degree now. But

(13:58):
the problem with this is six percent of the pieces
have re entered the atmosphere. And here's the interesting thing.
Half of those pieces came down in the last twelve months,
and this has to do with increased solar activity, which
normally we kind of it's not something we get really
excited about in terms of like, yeah, increased solar activity.
This idea of solar maximum or peak activity could actually

(14:22):
be a boon to us in terms of cleaning up
space junk. Right, the Sun, as we've mentioned before, is
pumping out energy. It's pumping out energy of the Earth,
and some of this is shielded by our electromagnetic field,
but the rest of it actually reaches the Earth. Powers
the Earth gives us a lot of the stuff we need,
and if we have all the space junk floating around
out there, an increase in that solar activity can stir
things up a bit. Yeah. In fact, if we've got

(14:45):
these solar players in these kernal mass ejections, which by
the way, when I talk about this solar maximum, this
peak activity is eleven year period that is going to
come to fruition in I believe in terms of the
ultimate amount of solar activity. So I think of it
as blasting the atmosphere with heat with these solar players
and coronal mass ejections from you know, sort of raining

(15:07):
upon the Earth's atmosphere. This causes the atmosphere to expand,
and this expansion pushes some of the gas to higher altitudes,
which creates drag on orbiting space debris that causes it
to slow down. And then as the debris slows down
or gravity pulls it to the lower altitudes where the
atmosphere is even thicker. So then you get even more drag, right,

(15:28):
and then you get slower debris. So eventually debris re
enters the atmosphere sooner than it would without the solar influence.
And here's here's the good news. It burns up safely
for the most part. So that's why we've seen such
an influx of that Chinese satellite that those pieces coming in.
So there's this idea that the Sun could actually be

(15:49):
very helpful at least until when it when it reaches
its peak capacity or maximum output in the eleven year
period and helping us to keep taps on this of it. Okay,
so we're keeping tabs, we've been keeping tabs. Occasionally the
Sun might accidentally help out sort of solar hoovering. Yeah,
but what else are we doing, right, that's the big question.

(16:11):
We can exercise a little bit of forethought in the
way we plan missions and uh, you know, moving forward.
But there's still a lot of junk up there. What
are we doing give anything to clean it up? Well,
there's something called the Swiss Janitor satellite. This comes to
us from the Swiss Space Center at EPFL and that's
the launch of the clean Space one. This was back

(16:32):
in February, I believe, and it's a project that developed
and built the first installment of a family of what
they see as satellites that are especially designed to clean
up space debris. And the idea is to launch a
small grabber spacecraft to chase after orbiting pieces of space junk,
and then it'll attach itself to it de orbit and
the whole Incholado then re enters the atmosphere where it

(16:54):
burns up on re entry. There are a few other
plans to that involve basically micro satellites are many satellites
that around and essentially net this stuff up and kind
of form like not really a Katamari ball, but they
form a nice big sack of space traction then bring
it back to the atmosphere to Another tactic that we've
been using is making sure that we take retiring spacecraft

(17:14):
up to a graveyard orbit so that we know they're
going out of commission. Well, let's move them into an
orbit where they're not going to be interfering with anything.
It's actually active, okay, So just sort of pushing it
away from us a little bit more, right in the
same way that you move your junk car into the
backyard as opposed to leaving it in the front yard.
It's still there, you just can't see it from the
street right right, house values go up. There's this idea

(17:37):
of using little puffs of gas that I kind of like.
It's just from a team from the University of Michigan,
and they're thinking about using pulses of gas fired into
the path of debris and this would increase again the
drag on orbiting space junk, leaving it to plunge downward
into the Earth's atmosphere, and the pulses themselves would leave

(17:58):
no no trace. So there we get our our boy
scouts creta there, and it also leaves no solid material
in orbit. Another really interesting tactic that NASA is pretty
excited about comes from Tether's Unlimited. This is a Seattle
area space contractor and they've been working on this idea
for years. But their idea is to create this thing
called a wrestler, which is a mid sized vehicle about

(18:18):
four hundred pounds, and it piggybacks a ride on other satellites.
So it so the idea here is, let's cut some corners.
It'll just hit your ride with some sort of big
price e corporat or national supported telecommunication satellite launch or
or mission launch. And then once up there, it's saying
to pull off this really neat tethering technique. So it
goes into orbit and it sidles up to this piece

(18:38):
of space junk and it detaches an electrodynamic tether. This
is a wire mesh tail. It's up to six miles long,
and then it shoots an amp of current through that
material and this current interacts with the Earth's magnetic field,
producing a drag effect that lowers the debris towards the
atmosphere and re entry. Yeah, and that one's really cool
because that seems pretty promising in the perspective of gathering

(19:00):
up debris, but not only that, just being able to
afford it. I think that was estimated somewhere in the
tens of millions whereas some of the other ideas and
projects we're talking in the billions. Yeah, they're saying this
one would just to do a test mission, mind you,
that would take out a few tons of trash, would
be tens of millions of dollars, which which again puts

(19:20):
this whole problem into perspective. Like like so many problems
that humans get themselves into on a personal or national scale,
you don't work on a problem early enough, it ends
up costing you far more later on, and it reaches
a point where you have to either pay that bill
or just be content with sticking where you are. Well.

(19:40):
And this is the kind of problem too, is just
like your house if you don't necessarily want to put
all your money into, you know, redoing the roof, but
you have to write because otherwise you're going to be
explicit to the elements. But that's not the cool thing
you see from the street. Same thing with Nassa's like,
that's not our flashy cool stuff. It really do need
to take care of the space chunk. The problem is
that they don't necessarily have a gigantic budget in the

(20:01):
first place, and it's certainly not something that they have
dedicated to this problem in the budget from last year,
they started the four thousand dollar research grants to try
to look into this, and that idea that you just
talked about was was in there and very viable. So
it's just a question about of when and how many
dollars are gonna lay down here, and then it's a

(20:23):
question of exponential numbers here. Again, this is from Evan L. Schwartz,
he says, and this is the Wired article waste management.
He says, it's proliferations based junk threatens not only current
in future space missions, but also global communications, mobile phone networks,
satellite television, radio broadcasts, weather tracking, military surveillance, even the

(20:44):
dashboard GPS devices that keep us from getting lost. The
number of manufactured objects cluttering the sky is now expected
to double every few years as large objects weaken and
split apart, and new collisions create more castlerian debris leading
to yet more collisions. So it's kind of a runaway
environment here. Yeah, and like we said before, it affects

(21:05):
modern life on so many levels. I mean telecommunications certainly,
space exploration, but national security. Just again, our entire tell
communications network, it is growing to depend on these satellites.
Now you could argue, I guess that if we had
a completely garbaged up orbit, if we had this good
rebout going on, then that it would be harder for
say like a vampire spaceship to drift into our atmosphere

(21:28):
and cause problems, or the or the head of a
planet sized transformer. Um, you know, good luck getting into
our junk up atmosphere and causing trouble for the denizens
of Earth. But on the other hand, we we might
be trapped in this dark age that Clark warned us about.
It's possible, But I mean, I think that the fact
that it's come to life and it's now a priority,
and that people are realizing that space junk may drop

(21:50):
in your backyard if it's not under control pretty soon
as a problem. Yeah. And if I know anything about
the human species, once we know that there's a problem
and we know that we've been causing it, we're really
good about fixing it and addressing it. So I think
you're right. Let's be optimistic about this. Okay, now, now
you're just being facetious. Let's just put that out there

(22:12):
on the line, all right, So there you go, space drunk,
Let's work on it. Let's come up with some ideas.
All right, I'm gonna have the robots stay in his
closet right now and not bring us out any of
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(22:34):
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