99% Invisible - 233- Space Trash, Space Treasure

Episode Date: October 25, 2016

In the summer of 1961 the upper stage of the rocket carrying the Transit 4A satellite blew up about two hours after launch. It was the first known human-made object to unintentionally explode in space, and it created hundreds of … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The moment is at hand the countdown reaches zero. In 1957, a few months after the Soviet satellite's Sputnik became the first human object in space, the United States launched Explorer I. Explorer is in orbit, broadcasting to the world its code and scientific data, cosmic ray intensity, meteor impact, solar radiation. These are the dry facts that will help carry a man ever father into the age of sleep. And with that, the space race was underway.

And the two world powers began launching more and more satellites every year. A lot of these early missions failed before they ever made it into orbit. That's producer Emmett Fitzgerald. But there were successes, and little by little space started to fill up with human-made objects. By the summer of 1961, there were 115 satellites circling the Earth. And it was during that summer that the US launched an unmanned rocket carrying the Transit 4A satellite. And about two hours after launch. The rocket blew up.

It was the first known object to unintentionally explode in space. And it created about 300 fragments of totally useless space junk. Some of these pieces got pulled into the atmosphere and burned up, but around 200 are still up there today. At the time, most people weren't all that concerned about a few bits of metal floating around in the vastness of space. I think the general feeling was that space was big and that we could put objects, satellites up into space without really having any consequences to that.

This is Hugh Lewis, a space junk expert at the University of South Hampton. Back in the early days of the space age, it wasn't seen as a problem. While the universe may be infinite, orbital space, the region where objects revolve around the Earth is finite, and the amount that we use regularly is even more limited. Most satellites end up in a few particular orbits,

almost like freeways. And the traffic on those freeways is actually quite a lot, and that's where the problem starts to emerge. As the traffic increases, so does the chance of collision. One of the regions of space that got busy pretty quickly is the area called Low Earth Orbit. That's a region of space that extends up to an altitude of about 2000 kilometers. That's really heavily congested.

And when a satellite stops working in Low Earth Orbit, it can stay in that region for hundreds of years. By the mid-1960s, there were already lots of old and defunct satellites floating around up there. And NASA began to look into this. They started to really think about the potential issues that space debris, orbital debris might pose in the future, and that was an activity that was really led by Don Kessler, who was at NASA at the time. My name is Don Kessler. I started the Arble Debris program at NASA. Kessler is retired now, but when he got started at NASA, he was studying meteoroids.

And specifically, what happens when two meteoroids collide and break apart into smaller pieces? Eventually, Don Kessler started doing similar research on space junk, or as NASA calls it orbital debris. Kessler was studying what happens when one piece collides with another, and this is what he found. Every time you have a breakup, you have increased the probability of another collision, and that eventually just causes the whole population to continue to increase exponentially with time. This idea that space junk multiplies as more and more objects collide and break apart came to be known as the Kessler Syndrome.

And Kessler predicted that the growth in space junk would eventually snowball. And that cascading phenomena after a hundred years gets to be well out of control. There's not much you can do about it and you've created an environment that becomes very hazardous to spacecraft. If the growth in SpaceJunk went totally unchecked, Kessler predicted that space could become so filled with debris that it would be difficult to fly a spacecraft without getting hit.

Kessler's findings were discussed throughout the Space Community, and in 1979, NASA started its Orbital Debris program to study and monitor space junk. And they appointed him to lead it. Around that same time people began to use space more and more. Countries all around the world were launching weather satellites, military satellites, communications satellites, and amateur radio satellites. And because space isn't owned by any one government in particular, low Earth orbit began to experience a tragedy of the commons.

Lots of different countries were leaving trash everywhere, but no one was tidying up. The amount of junk in space continued to grow throughout the 20th century, but it wasn't until 2009, long after Donald Kessler had retired, that people really started to take the issue seriously Two communication satellites have collided in space Around 800 kilometers above Siberia. It's the first car on February 10th 2009 the aridium 33 an active US communication satellite struck a defunct Russian satellite called the Cosmos 2251 it was the first collision between two fully intact satellites and it created thousands of pieces of debris.

Donald Kessler wasn't surprised. 40 years prior, he had predicted that the first major collision between whole satellites of this size would happen around the new millennium. For most people, the collision made the problem of space junk feel much more urgent. So I think that the Rydium Cosmos collision really was a wake-up call, and certainly it sparked a new wave of research and funding even for space debris. That's Hugh Lewis again. Lewis says that it's hard to estimate the total amount of space debris out there, but

scientists can track anything larger than 10 centimeters in diameter. We're talking about maybe a population of objects that are soft, full size or bigger that is about 30,000 objects in orbit at the moment. Everything from small fragments to old rocket bodies to satellites the size of a bus. And that's just the stuff that's large enough to track. There are potentially millions of millimeter-sized bits of debris, shards of glass, screws, flex of paint.

And even that tiny stuff can cause real problems when it's whipping around the earth at up to 17,000 miles per hour. Yeah, the object does not need to be big in order to carry a lot of energy and to cause a substantial amount of damage if it were to hit anything. The most vulnerable thing in orbital space is the International Space Station, which routinely has to make newvers to avoid collisions with larger pieces of space debris.

The International Space Station is also equipped with expensive heavy-duty shielding to protect it from smaller bits of space junk. Astronaut Tim Peake recently took a picture of a sizeable divot in one of the space station windows where a piece of debris penetrated several centimeters into the glass. So that's the constant reminder for the astronauts on the space station. Every time they look at that window, that's a recognition of the threat that's out there. But it's not just a threat to astronauts. So much of our technology here on Earth is dependent on vulnerable satellites. You know, pretty much everyone in the UK, you know, in the US, probably has a smartphone with GPS capability on it.

That's a service that's provided by spacecraft. And when you think about navigation signals that are used for aircraft that are flying in the sky, it's everywhere in our daily lives and not just for convenience, it's for our safety. International telephone communication, weather forecasting, keeping track of time in different parts of the world, all of this is dependent on satellites. Global banking systems fall down if we lost the signals we get from space. These risks are causing scientists around the world

to look into how they can clean up this space environment. Now, when someone wants to put a new satellite into space, there are UN guidelines that say, you have to come up with a plan to dispose of that satellite within 25 years. There are a couple issues with these guidelines, though. One, they're not being followed by everyone. And two, even if they were more closely adhered to, it might not be enough to make space

safe. Because there's already so much stuff up there, and as Donald Kessler discovered, space junk multiplies. Even if we stop putting any more stuff up there, the number of pieces of junk will continue to grow. And then we start to think about, okay, how do we address the problem, perhaps a bit more proactively? How do we deal with the stuff that's already up there?

All around the world, engineers are dreaming up ways to remove debris from space. In many cases, by sending it down into Earth's atmosphere to burn up. You throw a net over the object, harpoons that have been talked about. There are proposals for space-junks slingshots and solar sales that could carry a piece of junk out of a dangerous orbit. Robotic arms, attaching a really long tether to the object to try and bring it down, attaching a solid rocket motor. No matter how you do it, removing an object from space will be expensive and politically complicated.

But right now, the European Space Agency is planning a mission to remove one of its derelict satellites and they're considering these kinds of ideas. That mission is scheduled to take place in 2023. So we are on the cusp of this type of activity. But even if we found the perfect technology to safely destroy all of the space junk in Earth orbit, not everyone is on board. I completely agree that this is a problem

we need to do something about. But I think the way that it's framed leaves out a really vital factor and that factor is human cultural heritage. That's Alice Gorman. I'm also known as Dr. Spacejunk. I'm a senior lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at Flanders University, and I do research on space archaeology,

particularly looking at spacejunk in low earth orbit. For much of her career, Alice Gorman, or Dr. Spacejunk, researched Aboriginal culture in Australia. I'd been a professional archaeologist for many years and I was working on a consulting job in Queensland and looked up at the sky and realized that some of those points of light were not stars or planets. They were actually human manufactured spacecraft, and some of those bits of staff were space junk. And that's kind of what archaeologists do.

We're focused on the stuff that people discard, the stuff they throw away, that the garbage of humanity. So while the rest of her colleagues continued digging in the dirt, Gorman turned her attention skyward and began to study the archaeology of space. Because amidst the scraps of floating debris are some really remarkable artifacts. A lot of those things we currently call space chunk are actually quite extraordinary objects that have so much to tell us about the early history of the space age. I've got a lot of favorites in

Loweth Orbit, Vanguard one Vanguard one is definitely one of them. Launched by the United States in 1958, Vanguard one is currently the oldest intact object in space. There's little grapefruit size, aluminium sphere with four antennas sticking out on the sides. It's floating around up there, along with the most recent satellites,

along with technology that's so incredibly different. And there are objects in orbit that look nothing like a traditional satellite, like the West Ford Needles, which were these small copper antennas that were sent in the space in the 1960s. They were really tiny, so they were only like a centimeter big.

And the idea was they would form a reflective halo around the earth that radio signals could be bounced from. Using radio waves for global communication never really took off, but some of the needles are still up there, bunched together in little clumps of copper. So I find them really fascinating, and there's probably a lot more of those kinds of stories and objects out there that tell a story of technology that could have gone in one direction, but it veered off in another one instead.

But Gorman's all-time favorite piece of space junk might be the track satellite, which the US Navy launched from Cape Canaveral in 1961. And it was the first satellite to have a poem in it. Written by a professor of Italian literature at Yale named Thomas Bergen. And one stanza of the poem is inscribed on one of the instrument panels inside the satellite. So it was kind of already conceived as a cultural object. And that cultural object is still up there orbiting the earth about a thousand kilometers up. The poem reads,

All of these objects might seem far away and inaccess human love, the chill of space. All of these objects might seem far away and inaccessible, but the day will likely come when we can go and visit them. You can already get to the International Space Station for a cool $20 million, and Gorman says that one day we will be able to fly coach into space. It's quite likely that, you know, when it's accessible and affordable thing to do, people will go into space and maybe start some fancy orbital hotel. And the two things we know from what's happened already that they will want to do is take a lot

of photographs and have sex. But, after a while, that stuff's going to become old hat too. And what happens when zero G sex gets boring? Historical space tours. That's what. You might have different kinds of tours. You might say, let's do the amateur satellite tour. Or you might say, let's do the Cold War satellites. Or you might say, let's go and see all of the satellites that come from,

you know, my nation's space agency. So yeah, I totally think this stuff is going to happen. It's going to be one of the things people do once we actually have a space tourism industry that people can afford. But the irony is, in order to have viable space tourism, we need a safe, orbital environment. And so, if we don't find an effective way to clean up some of the junk in space,

we might never be able to go and see the good stuff. And it's kind of frightening. It's in the most extreme version of this, having ventured out to the moon and with spacecraft, the voyages beyond the solar system, we would actually be shut back on Earth. So Gorman is all for cleaning up space. She just wants us to think carefully before we destroy something that we might want back.

Because she can imagine the archaeologists and historians of the future trying to wrap their heads around humanity's first trips into space. There will be so many mysteries, so many things that don't make sense. So many stories that you have a little bit here and a little bit there and you're trying to fill in the gaps. And those future archaeologists will thank us for leaving some space junk, right where it is. 99% invisible was produced this week by Emmett Fitzgerald, with three few Seth Sam Greenspan Katie Mingle Kurt Colstead, Avery Truffleman, Delaney Hall,

Taren Mazza, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks to Ok Akumi of Hell Audio for some of the music that we use this week. We are a project of 91.7 KALW San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook, all of us are on Twitter, Instagram, and Spotify, but to find out more about this story including cool pictures and links and listen to all the episodes of 99% Invisible, you must go to 99pi.org. Radio tapio. From P.R.X.