Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Space Debris (featuring Dr. Jonathan McDowell)

Episode Date: December 31, 2024

Daniel and Kelly talk to Dr. Jonathan McDowell about the kinds of junk you find in space, the problems it causes, and what we can do about it. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grazias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in, like, over 25 years.

Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and trending, with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs. And of course, the great bevras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Dacias Come Again on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast.

Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. avoidance is easier ignoring is easier denials easier complex problem solving takes effort listen to the psychology podcast on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime on the new podcast america's crime lab every case has a story to tell and the DNA holds the truth he never thought he was going to get caught and i just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people, an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show,

and we had a blast. Take a listen. Sue and I were like riding the lime bikes the other day. And we're Wee! People write bikes because it's fun. We got more incredible guests like Megan in store, plus news of the day and more. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network. Tune in to All the Smoke Podcast, where Matt and Stacks sit down with former first lady, Michelle Obama. Folks, find it hard to hate up close. And when you get to know people and you're sitting in their kitchen tables and they're talking like we're talking. You know, you hear our story, how we grew up, how Barack grew up. And you get a chance for people to unpack and get beyond race.

All the Smoke featuring Michelle Obama. To hear this podcast and more, open your free IHeart Radio app. Search all the smoke and listen now. In 1962, the United States detonated a 1.4 million. megaton hydrogen bomb 400 kilometers above the surface of the earth. This was part of a project called Operation Fishbowl. Not surprisingly, it created a huge explosion, which lit up the sky and disrupted radio transmissions. It also knocked out streetlights in Hawaii, which may have worried

partygoers who, according to Smithsonian Magazine, were gathering on hotel rooftops for H-bomb explosion viewing parties. It also messed up six different satellites, four belong to belonged to Americans, one was Russian, and it also messed up the very first British satellite. The Soviet Union was conducting similar tests of nuclear weapons in space at the same time. This didn't bode well for the future of satellites in space. This amazing new technology of satellites held a lot of promise, but who would want to invest in it if the United States and the Soviet Union kept making satellites inoperable with nuclear weapons tests in space? Well, lucky for all of us, in 1963, both of us.

both nations agreed to stop screwing up space for the rest of us, and signed the partial nuclear test ban treaty, which banned the test of nuclear weapons in some places, including space. In this year, you also get a UN resolution saying weapons of mass destruction can't be orbited in space, and you get a United Nations Outer Space Treaty, which comes into force in 1967, which reiterated all of these points for other nations as well. Phew! Now satellites are safe, right? Well, Probably. While space is really vast, we've put a lot of stuff in orbit around Earth, and the pace at which we're sending stuff up is ever increasing as the cost of sending that

stuff up drops. Could it get too crowded up there? Could some of the space litter we've left behind smash into the stuff we're still trying to use? I'd be really bummed out if I couldn't watch cat videos using my Starlink satellite-provided internet. To answer some of these questions about the risks of stuff bumping into each other in space, we're interested in interviewing Dr. Jonathan McDowell, who has been tracking objects sent to space since 1961 when the Soviet Union sent up Sputnik, the first ever satellite in space. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist.

and I feel like my house is constantly filling up with junk. I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I'm a parasitologist, and I have felt that way since I married Zach. And the rate at which the junk has been increasing has exponentated since we had children. So we might have a Kessler syndrome situation happening in our house in the near future. That's only if your children collide with each other and make more children or something. The biologist in me is not okay with that metaphor. No, that was bad. So which of you is the cleaner-upper, or are you both contributing to the junk?

I am the cleaner-upper. I am also the less bringer-stuffer into the houseer. I don't like to buy a lot of new stuff, but that's not my husband's attitude about stuff. What about your family? I'm the thrower-awayer. I'm the person constantly carting out bags of junk into the house, whereas my wife and daughter like going thrift-door shopping. And so they're bringing stuff in and then I'm like taking trips to the thrift store. When I take a trip to the thrift store, for example, it's a negative impact on our house. And they have the opposite effect. So we have like a thrift circuit going. Oh, man. So I've gotten myself in trouble for being the person who throws stuff out in the house because my daughter will not let go of things.

And Zach doesn't want to let go of things either. And I got in trouble because once I was like, well, if I just throw it out, they won't notice. But then they notice. And so for a while, I moved everything to a storage unit. you might be noticing it's a whole thing. Yes. It's a whole thing. I see you've moved to the multi-stage throwout technique.

Like I'm going to put it over here and then when nobody notices, I'm moving over there, and then eventually I get to throw it away. And that's why I have a whole farm. Lots of spots to squirrel their junk away. Oh, and I just remembered that Zach has been listening to the podcast, which is so nice of him. Don't check the tenant house. Well, the danger of moving on to a farm in a big house is

The more space you have, the more junk you get. I feel like we have a constant density of junk. And if we lived in a smaller space, we would have less stuff. The belief has been that because we have all of this space, we can get more stuff. But I don't want the junk outside. I don't want more stuff. I don't want more stuff. Yeah.

Space is more valuable than almost any stuff. Whenever we throw something away, I'm like, ah, look at all that empty space. It's wonderful. Yes, right? Isn't it nicer when you come home with like a bag in your hand and to just be able to like put it on the counter because there's clear space on the counter and not like have to elbow cups out of the way. Oh, man.

100% agree with you. All right. All right. Team clean over here. And if we were in charge of the atmosphere around Earth, maybe you and I would keep it pretty clean. Yeah, but the people that we keep interacting with would be like, well, there's a lot of space.

So we're just going to move it somewhere else, you know? And then the graveyard orbit would get all crowded. And I don't know. I'm a pessimist, Daniel. Yeah. Zach and Katrina would fill the universe with junk. So big. There's room.

There's room. Don't worry. Buy more books. Buy more books. Well, we don't have to keep them. We're not going to read them again. No, I can't let go of a book. Books got to stay forever.

Zach, you can keep all your books in orbit near Pluto. Mm-hmm. I love you. And today on the podcast, we're going to be talking about junk and space junk with somebody who has spent their whole career thinking and tracking bits of garbage in space. I have loved interacting with Jonathan McDowell on Twitter. When we were writing a city on Mars, he was my go-to person where I was like, The Needles from Project Westford, are they still in space, Jonathan?

The glove that got lost during the EVA number 543, is that still in space? He knows the answer to all of these questions. He is the guy. We're excited to have him on the show today. So let's jump right in. On today's show, we have Dr. Jonathan McDowell. He's an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center. Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He's also the editor of Jonathan's Space Report, a free Internet newsletter founded in 1989, which provides technical details of satellite launches. His website provides the most comprehensive historical list of satellite launch information, starting with Sputnik, and he's a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, an American Astronomical Society fellow, and he has an asteroid named after him,

4589 McDowell. So he's now officially the second person on the show who has an asteroid named after him. Martin Elvis beat you by a few months there. My old boss, yes. He was your old boss? He's the one who conned me into crossing the pond and coming to work at Harvard

instead of staying in England, which I'm now sort of regretting. But, yes, no, Martin, I go back away. Oh, wonderful. Well, he's absolutely lovely. And he talked to us about asteroids. We're talking to you about stuff that's floating around in space. So we had a listener who asked a question and we're going to play the question a little bit later.

But that got us interested in space debris. So I think for starters, let's just talk about what kind of stuff we have up there, debris or otherwise. That's orbiting the Earth right now. So there are about 25,000 objects that the Space Force radars are tracking every day. It's a lot. 25,000. Wow, that's an incredible number. That's just the ones big enough to see, right? They go from the 450-ton international space station down to,

little shards of debris that are only about five or ten centimeters across. I'll talk a bit about where they come from, but below that, between, like, say, one centimeter and ten centimeters, we think there might be as many as a million pieces of debris that we don't even know about because they're too small for the radars to see. So now, space is big, but everything in space, because of Kepler's laws, is traveling like 17,000 miles an hour. And so, you know, it's pretty quite. crazy up there. And we have now 10,000 working satellites. Just five years ago, it was only

1,000. Now it's gone up to 10,000. Is that all Starlink? Well, about half of them are Starlink, yeah. So there's internet relay, there's Internet of Things relay, there's ship and the airplane tracking, there's weather satellites, there's spy satellites, resource monitoring satellites, signals intelligence, which is like intercepting communications and radio signals for the military. And of course, a few science satellites. People often think that space is like, oh, that's science, but science is a pretty small fraction of what's going on. And what can happen is every time you launch a satellite, you use a rocket to do it. And to put it in orbit, the upper rocket stage has to get into orbit along with the satellite. So now you've launched your satellite,

but you've also made a piece of space junk. The rocket. stage. And nowadays, if you're like prudent, you have a restartable engine, you can bring the rocket stage down in the ocean afterwards. But we didn't used to even bother to do that. So if you look in the catalogue of there's now over 60,000 objects in the space object catalog, including all the re-entered ones, the second entry in the catalog is Sputnik, Russia's first satellite. But the first entry, satellite number one, is actually the rocket stage that puts Sputnik in orbit. And so the very first entry in the catalog is a piece of space jump. Oh, that's interesting and depressing.

Yeah. What's worse, if you leave a little extra fuel in the tank of your rocket stage, which you can tend to do, because you don't want to arrive at your destination running on empty. Rocket stages have fuel and oxidizer that combine to burn to make the flame. They're in separate tanks, separated by often like a rubber gasket or something like that, which over years can erode. The two can get together, and depending on your mix of propellant, 10 years after you abandon your rocket stage in Earth orbit,

the fuel and oxidizer can have a party and suddenly you don't have a rocket stage. You have 300 pieces of space debris. Oh, my God. So you're saying they explode? That would be the technical term, yes. Whereas the space guys like to say an RUD, a rapid unplanned disassembly. We have all kinds of euphemisms, right?

for the bad things that can go wrong in space. Another one of my favorites is, you know ICBM and a continental ballistic missile, but do you know I-O-B-M, which is in ocean by mistake? Oh, no. Love it. So what's the sort of natural context?

Like, we are creating these little bits of space junk, but was the near-earth atmosphere sort of empty before that, or are there like a lot of natural things floating out there? So within the orbit of the moon, we do have, like, meteors coming in, on escape trajectories, right? They're not orbiting the Earth. They have escape velocity of respect to the Earth.

They're going much, much faster than satellites. And so they come in, they burn up, they're gone. They don't hang out in Earth orbit. The only piece of natural space junk we have orbiting the Earth is the moon. You can't call the moon junk. Come on. Well, you know, it's a big lump of stone, you know. We added to that with Sputnik, and we've added ever since.

Again, not just rocket stages blowing up, but also satellites hitting each other. So in 2009, an iridium communication satellite hit an old Soviet dead communication satellite at about 20,000 miles an hour in orbit. And to give you an idea of the kinetic energy involved in that, right? I mean, it's like some number of giga-joules and I don't have a feel for that. So I calculated in terms of my unit of how hard something hurts is, Imagine being hit by a one-ton truck. You can kind of sense how much that would hurt.

The energy involved in one of these orbital collisions is about 50,000 times that. Wow. Wow. Oh, my gosh. And so what happens is a hypersonic shockwave goes through both spacecraft, reducing them to shrapnel. The clouds of shrapnel pass through each other largely unchanged,

and you end up with them in the original orbit, but many, many little pieces in. instead of one big one. So we don't like that. That's bad. It can cause, ultimately, if you have enough of those, you can get a chain reaction called the Kessler syndrome that could make space unusable.

And then some people think it's fun to fire a missile at one of their own satellites and blow it up just to show how powerful they are anti-satellite weapons. And that causes, yep, there's more debris due to that. There's been a move in recent years to go, you know, guys, that's probably not a good idea. Yeah, let's stick into that a little bit more. So I know that the Soviet Union, the United States, India, China, right?

They've all blown their own satellites up in space. Right. That is correct. Fortunately, so far, they've only been tests on their own satellites and not attacking somebody else's. So for our audience who's maybe not familiar with this, why are countries blowing up their own satellites? Right. It's to prove that they could blow up your satellites if they want it. And so the idea, you know, what people may not appreciate is so much of our lives

today actually invisibly depends on space technology. I mean, the most obvious case, of course, is GPS. I actually know how to read a map, but the younger generation are going to be really hosed. If GPS ever goes down, they're not going to be able to get home. I'd be host. And that was originally a military system to target cruise missiles. And so that's in a war, taking out the GPS satellites would be something that an attacker might want to do. Similarly, military around space communications. There are missile warning satellites that spot when a missile is launched, and that's, you know, how you get that warning. And there are these sort of various spy satellites, right? And so the military, even more than normal people, are so very invested in space. Their

systems are integrated with space systems. And so in a war, those space systems are obvious targets. And so the idea of anti-satellite weapons has been around for a long time, the first attempt that I'm aware of was in 1959 when they fired a test missile against the Explorer 6 satellite and missed it. But it's not a new idea, is what I'm saying. So all of these things, you know, very early, the 50s were a crazy time, man. They tried all kinds of stuff very early.

And so every time we blow up a satellite, you go from one object in space to like a million objects in space. Do we then track all of those individual components? Yeah, well, the ones above 10 centimeters, we track. And so sometimes people talk about shooting down a satellite, but I hate that phrase because you don't actually shoot it down. You add energy, especially into pieces, but those pieces still have orbital velocity and they stay in it. And so if you have a satellite that's, say, in a 500-kilometer circular orbit, the pieces are in elliptical orbits that are one end is 500, and then the other end might be lower or it might be higher as much as 1,000 kilometers or 2,000 kilometers coming down to the ones that go downward, you know, we'll reenter. quickly, the ones that go up will stay up for a long time. The worst one was a Chinese anti-satellite

test in 2007, and that created 3,000 pieces of tracked debris. And so in my catalog that I have on my website, each one of those 3,000 pieces has a catalog number from the Space Force. It has orbital parameters that are updated every day. It's quite a task keeping track of these things. So there's some random chunk of a satellite that has like a name and a place in your database and you're tracking it. It's just like a hunk of metal floating through space. That's exactly right. And, you know, every now and again, for example, the International Space Station has to dodge one of these things. So the Space Force tracks and goes, oh, hey, guys, about 24 hours from now, this chunk of metal is going to go within a few hundred

meters of the space station. Wait, before we get to the ISS, how do we track all these things? Like, who is tracking this random chunk of a Chinese satellite? How do we monitor these things? So mostly it's the US Space Force, which for low orbit satellites, they use radars. So you bounce radar, radio energy off the satellite, and the echo gives you its position and velocity. But it's a problem because if you have, like, say, 100 new pieces that you're tracking, so you see them come over, okay, you get measurements of 100 pieces. An hour and a half later, they've orbited the Earth.

You look again, you've got another 100 pieces, but matching up which one goes with which one is very, very non-trivial. And so it takes a long time to catalog the debris, and that's a period you're not getting warnings from those new objects. So that's why new debris is very bad. Radars are great up to about

1,000 kilometers, a few thousand kilometers. They're a one over out of the fourth law. If the thing is 10 times further away, it's 10,000 times weaker reflected signal. So for high orbit satellites, radars really aren't the way to go. And we've been using regular

our optical telescopes to observe the objects. And now we're actually starting to deploy satellites in high orbit whose job is to catalog all the other satellites and keep track of them. Why is it one over R to the fourth? Is it because you get one over R squared from your signal and then one over R squared from the bounce? Exactly right.

It's one over R squared each way. Wow, I see, so that's difficult. It seems to me like a really hard problem, even if you know where everything is, even if there's nothing new, because radar is just giving you locations, right? doesn't measure velocities. Yes, there's a Doppler, but it's only one component.

Oh, right, okay. Right, you have a range and a range rate, and then you only have a very approximate angular position on the sky, because the radar is very sharp. And so you need multiple observations to kind of resolve that and do it. So again, this is something they've been doing since the 1950s, and it was kind of manageable back then

when there weren't that many satellites. And now it's getting a really tough problem, and you can see them straight. There was a recent Chinese satellite launch. 18 satellites went up about a month ago. And it was only yesterday that Space Force started issuing orbital data for them because it took them that long to sort it out. It was a fascinating problem and really technically challenging.

And in the circumstances, they do a pretty good job, but it's not really good enough for what we need today. Yeah, it seems like a lot of compute is required. You have to know all these trajectories, predict where they are, get the new data, update the trajectories, if they deviate from your prediction. I'm wondering about the security here. Like, there must be things in space

that are like secret spy satellites. Are those parts of your database? Is the NSA watching you to see if you're tracking that stuff? If they're not, they're not doing their job. You've really acclimated to life in the United States, Jonathan. Yeah, right, exactly. The secret satellites are tracked by the Space Force. The U.S. secret satellites,

they don't release the orbital data for that publicly. The Russian and Chinese secret satellites, they do. The Israeli and French ones, they sometimes do and sometimes don't. So our friends, they keep the secret one secret, but for people we don't like, we just publish them. Until very recently, there was maybe 100 or so secret U.S. and allied satellites, and most of them were pretty big. Some of the old big bird spy satellites are like 10 tons, right, in low orbit. And so there are as bright as the brightest stars in the sky. And so in order to get their orbits, all you really need are binoculars in a stopwatch.

Sometimes not even binoculars. So it's in this category of like officially secret but totally obvious. Exactly. So, you know, we figure that there's a bunch of amateurs whose hobby is to fill in the holes and get the orbits of the satellites that aren't meant to be public. And we feel fine about that because we figure that if a bunch of amateur astronomers with binoculars can figure out these orbits, the North Koreans can. can too.

And so I think for a long time, the Space Force were a bit of denial, or the Air Forces as well, they were a bit of denial that they would ask us, what sensors are you using to detect our satellites? My eyes. We look up. It's coming overhead. There it is. And so I think now there's more of a realization that actually pretty fruitless, trying to

keep these orbits secret. And I think in the long run, for safety of space operations, so that, I think, other people know not to bump into them, the era of making the orbit data secret has got to end, I think, and that's an active discussion. Have we ever had a secret satellite blow up or turn into secret space debris? Absolutely, absolutely.

Secret space junk, never heard of that before. I think the most common cases, the upper stage from one of these satellites blew up and created a lot of debris. And so for a long time, those orbital data were secret classified, but they kind of wised up eventually and release that. So that's good. There's been some improvements lately in the transparency of the system, which I'm pleased to see. There's slowly, you know, there was a lot of like

Cold War mentality, and now it's sort of, even though we may be going to another Cold War or whatever. But see, one of the big things that's changed in the past 10 years is it used to be, I would give talks that I would say, space is about one third civilian government, one third military, and one third commercial. Those days are gone. Now, space is. is overwhelmingly commercial. And that means that the incentives at the government level, right, are to support the commercial industry. And that means more transparency in terms of not having to worry

about being hit by secret satellite. There's other transparency issues because companies want to keep their plan secret and things like that for commercial reasons. So that's a whole other issue. So times have really changed. The last five, 10 years has been a dramatic shift towards this new era of commercial space.

And what's your interest in it? I mean, you're an astrophysicist. Are you curious about this because you're just curious about anything in space? Or is this like political advocacy where you feel like, hey, space is for everyone and we should all know what's up there? You know, it's changed recently. So, yeah, I've had this separate life since I was a kid of wanting to know what was going on in space. And, you know, I found this list of the year's satellite launches when I was about 12. And I very quickly realized after copying it down that it wasn't really that great a list.

they could do better. And so 50 years later, I have the best list, because I'm obsessive like that. And so that was sort of my original impetus. And I've got more and more dragged into the policy side. And then as space has started to become so busy that humans are starting to have an impact on the space environment. And part of that is an impact on astronomy.

My two lives of astronomer and space pundit have kind of merged and very much now are becoming advocacy and becoming the Cassandra saying, hey, guys, we got a problem here with the overwhelming effect that we are now having on the space environment in a lot of different ways and the need for new regulation to adapt to the new environment that we're in. Well, let's take a quick break. And when we get back, we'll talk about policy and impacts. I had this overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call.

I said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation. And I just wanted to call on and let her know there's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling. And there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a nonprofit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice.

There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. Don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance, bro, tell you how to manage your money again.

Welcome to Brown Ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest. rates. I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan, starting with your local credit union, shopping around online, looking for some online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to judge. It is so expensive in these streets. I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt when it weighs on you. It's really

easy to just like stick your head in the sand. It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it. And in fact, it may be it even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in the backlog will be identified in our our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools,

they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories

I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests

for this new season of Family Secrets. Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, it's HoneyGerman. And my podcast,

Grazacus Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition.

I haven't audition in, like, over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs,

and those amazing Vibras you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the, code switching. I won't say whitewashed because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. Yeah. But the whole pretending and you know, it takes a toll on you.

Listen to the new season of Grasas Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back. So there's all this junk floating around in space. And I'm under the impression that part of why it's hard to remove the junk from space is because there's policies that make it difficult to take someone else's junk out of space without getting

their permission first. Is that correct? And what's holding us back from removing all of that junk from space? Right. That is part of it. And so, yes, the Outer Space Treaty says that unlike, say, stuff abandoned in the ocean, stuff in space, you can't abandon it. It's still your problem. And the outer space you didn't have an idea of companies or anything like that. And so if you want to put something in space, you're like SpaceX, for example, you've got to get a license from your government, in this case the US. And part of that license is then the US as a country takes on the duty of jurisdiction and control of that satellite. And so that means if there's an old Russian rocket stage orbiting that's been abandoned for 30 years, I can't go up and take it without getting Russian

permission because it's still theirs. And so that is seen by the space lawyers, particularly in the US, as a big, big problem that they don't want to, they kind of run and hide whenever you bring it up. I do feel this is a solvable problem that no one wants the space junk. One thing I'm encouraged by, so there's a company called Astroscale, which is based in Tokyo and in the UK. And they've been recently flew a satellite around a big old Japanese rocket stage observing it as sort of a preparatory mission to having the technology to remove it from orbit. And I think companies like that that have an international basis, if you can do sort of a bilateral thing where, say, a European mission takes out a Japanese piece of space junk with both countries agreement, you can sort

of set a tone that you can then grow later to go, okay, so we've done this. You see we're not doing anything nefarious. We're cleaning up the orbit. Hey, Russian guys, can you join us and help us get rid of your junk too? And I think that's the way forward. But, you know, obviously in the world political situation as it is, it's not true. And I was talking to someone the other day who was saying that one of the problems with these technologies for clearing out space junk is that you can say, like, oh, I'm going out there for space junk. And that's why I've got the laser and that's why I've got this arm so that I can grab your space junk and throw it down so it'll burn up in the atmosphere. But that's all dual use. That laser can be used to destroy someone else's

satellite, that grappling arm can throw someone else. And is that actually holding anything back? Or are people just willing to accept that when you develop the technology to remove stuff from space, maybe you're also developing some dual-use stuff to get used down the road? I think it's an issue that people bring up. I mean, personally, I think that's true. I hate the term dual-use. It's like everything is dual-used. You know, I can stab you with my pen. I mean, yes, of course, any satellite that's maneuverable can be maneuvered to kind of, you know, smash into your satellite, right? Yeah. And so I think that's just an excuse for not doing anything.

Okay. Or just an expression of mistrust, you know, is getable over, in my opinion. But it's going to take a while. So I think, you know, the last 10 years, we've seen a bunch of experiments. The British in particular did a fun set of experiments where they sent a harpoon at a time. to try and catch it. They threw a net around the satellite to reel it in and catch it.

And so people are trying crazy stuff and were sort of starting to settle on, okay, what are the approaches that will actually work? And I think then the next step is to go and actually do it for real and start. And the first people to do this were actually surprisingly the Chinese. The Chinese, a couple years ago,

they had this navigation satellite in geostationary orbit that had died and was just drifting in the traffic lane, you know? And so they sent up another satellite that went and locked onto it, probably with a robot arm or something, and brought it up 300 kilometers into what we call the graveyard, a sort of a space junkyard, and released it there, and then went back down to go look for another target.

And that was the first time that anyone had actually done a kind of garbage truck space debris removal for really, with a real piece of space debris. And so, you know, the fact that the U.S. hasn't done that yet is frankly a little bit embarrassed. Yeah. It would be nice for leading the cleanup. I have a sort of naive question as a physicist. Like, if the natural environment is just the moon, that suggests that there's some process of clearing near-Earth orbit of bits.

Like if you had rocks coming in, they would naturally gravitate together or something. What is the sort of time scale for nature to take care of this itself, for it to, like, form a ring? or to pull together into a new moon made of space junk. If you just leave the satellite population as it is, what happens? And yeah, let's say, if the Earth were a perfectly round point source and the Moon and the Sun didn't exist, then things were just orbit forever

without changing their orbital parameters. The Earth has an atmosphere. And so below about 1,000 kilometers, there's just enough atmosphere to have a headwind at all global velocities that will eventually bring stuff back down into the atmosphere. And that time scale is every 11 years, we have the famous solar cycle, the solar maximum, that makes the atmosphere more dense.

And that basically clears out everything below 500 kilometers in one or two cycles. So if you're below 5 or 600 kilometers, you're going to reenter the Earth's atmosphere within 20-something years. But if you're between like 600 kilometers and 10,000 kilometers, you're going to stay orbiting for centuries to millennia. There really isn't that much affecting you. The moon's far enough out that it's not really bothering you. Once you get beyond like 100,000 kilometers,

now you have to start worrying about the gravity of the moon and the sun, and that will squeeze and turn your orbit. And it's fun, actually. There are weird things like the cosi effect that exoplanet astronomers are really into, but also apply in Earth satellite stuff. There's a lot of parallels in the math. The bail just wants to know what's the Kozai effect.

So what it is, is if you have an elliptical orbit and there's another body like the moon tugging on you, what it does is it squeezes and stretches the orbit, so it becomes more and less elliptical in a periodic way, and at the same time tilts the orbit relative to the equator. So the satellite I work on, Chander, is in an orbit like that. And over a decade or so, it goes from almost equatorial to almost polar and back again. and the low point of the orbit started off at 10,000 kilometers, it goes up to like 15,000, comes down to 5,000, and back up again. And if you get the sun and moon align,

you could even have the low point go negative, which would be the end of the mission, because then you tried to orbit through the surface of the Earth. It doesn't work very well. And so that's just one example of all the funky stuff that can happen. The flattening of the Earth can be important. What about the gravitation between the objects? Like, I understood that if you have some huge set of debris in orbit around a planet,

if it's close below the Roche limit, the tidal forces will keep it from coalescing. For listeners who aren't familiar, the Roche limit is how close you can get to a planet before its tidal forces will pull you apart. We have tidal forces from planets because the planet's gravity pulls on the closer bit harder than on the further bit. But if you're far enough away from the planet, your internal structure can still hold you together. But if a moon, for example, gets too close to a planet, those tidal forces will pull it apart, shred it, and turn it into a ring. But if it's far enough away, the self-gravity will

eventually pull it together into a new moon. Could that happen eventually with all of our space junk? I haven't done that math. I doubt it. I think the total mass isn't enough to get you self-gravitating. We've launched maybe 20,000 tons of stuff. That sounds like a lot, but I guess it's not compared to an astronomical object, yeah. Yeah, not compared to even a fairly small moon. My guess is that that would not happen. Maybe we should use a moon as a unit of measuring how much space junk we put into this out there

because it would make us feel better about it. The International Standard Moon, yeah, okay, I'll take that under consideration, Daniel. All right, so when you were describing Chandra's orbit, it's becoming even more clear to be how hard it must be to track all of these objects because they're all doing their own sort of things while they're out there.

So we've got all of this junk, that's sort of hard to track. You had sort of touched on the Kessler syndrome. Let's dive into that a little bit more. So space is huge. How big of a risk is it that we're going to start getting these feedbacks where everything runs into each other? Let's talk about that.

So space is huge, but low Earth orbit isn't that huge, right? So if we focus on the busiest part of space right now from the human point of view, which is all the satellites between the bottom of the Earth's atmosphere and about 2,000 kilometers, There's a lot of stuff there. The average distance between any two objects is about 100 kilometers. But you're going at 25,000 kilometers an hour. So the analogy I always use is, you know, if you're driving on the highway,

we're always reminded the faster you go, the further you have to leave the distance from the car in front of you, right? So when you're traveling at 25,000 kilometers an hour, you don't have a lot of dodge time in 100 kilometers, right? And so we do get collisions, and we're seeing them. We're seeing small collisions that are maybe not destroying a satellite entirely, but kind of breaking stuff off it. And the trouble is that the collision rate goes to the square of the number of satellites. So if you have 10 times as many satellites, you have 100 times as many collisions. So right now, the collision rate is not that bad. Even so, if you stop launching everything

today, the collision rate is high enough that eventually, on timescales of a century, you would start to get this runaway chain reaction. What's the collision rate like now? How many collisions do we see per day or per year? I think we see two or three small ones per year. Okay. Maybe one big one, a decade of order. And so that is amplified by what we call breakup events.

There's not one satellite dumping another, but when the rocket stage blows up, for example. and things like that. And we have several of those a year, adding hundreds of objects to the catalog each year from that kind of source. The number of debris objects is increasing. It's not like in the movie Gravity, right, where everything goes to hell in about half an hour, right? This is something that plays out. As with most environmental things, right?

You slowly drown in your own waste. Right? Every year, it's a little bit worse and a little worse. But it accelerates, right? You're saying that the collision rate depends on the number of objects squared. So every time you have an object that breaks into two, you've increased the number,

which now increases the rate of collisions, and that's the feedback loop, right? That's exactly correct, yes. And is this all going to be exacerbated even more by additional constellations of satellites? So SpaceX has their Starlink, but I think China's planning something similar? Yeah, China's made the first two launches

of its Kianfan, 1,000-sale satellite. And, you know, people have seen the success of Starlink in providing communications in Ukraine. And so all the militaries in all the countries want their own, we must have control over it ourselves, Starlink constellation. And so I think in addition to the commercial interest, there's military interest. And so, yeah, we're going to see more and more of these constellations come along. Amazon have started deploying theirs. There's a company called e-space that wants to launch hundreds of thousands of satellites. So this is really happening.

What SpaceX will tell you is they have this Whizzo algorithm that we'll fix it in software, basically, that the satellites have these argon electric thrusters. They accelerate argon atoms with electric potential from solar panels to provide low thrust, but very many miles per gallon rocket engines that can do slow dodges, not fast dodges. And so they're always calculating, you know, they're doing thousands and thousands of small maneuvers to avoid each other and other people's satellites. And they're like, we got this. You know, we know how to do this. I think their math works out if you assume that the, you know, errors are always bell curve and, you know, but that's not reality.

The reality is that, as we say in the trade, errors are non-Galcian. They're not like random. Someone screws up and something goes very wrong. And it only takes two people and two different constellations to screw up in the right way, as it were, for your algorithms to just totally fail and you have a collision. And so we'd be lucky so far. But I think if you up the number of satellites by another factor of 10 or so, the chances are that we're going to start seeing collisions.

SpaceSace is being quite careful. They're actually retiring now about 300 of their satellites that have components that they feel are dodgy and might cause a failure. And so they're bringing them down under control while they're still working and incinerating them in the atmosphere, which is a whole other environmental problem

that's just emerging. Because, you know, messing with the chemistry of the upper atmosphere, what could possibly go wrong? That's worked fine for us so far. Yeah, right. But putting that aside for a second, they're trying to be what they feel is responsible bringing these satellites down. But not all companies maybe are going to do that.

And for example, of the first batch of Kianfan satellites, 17 of the 18 have started raising the orbits. One of them looks like it may have failed in SRI turn column rule, which we'll leave it up there for a century. If you're launching 10,000 satellites and you have a 1% failure rate, say, that's 100 failed satellites added to the mix. And, you know, so it doesn't take too many of those to kind of exacerbate the problem. But these companies must be incentivized to solve this problem, right?

They don't want to invest billions in their network and then have them all be destroyed. They must be clear right about it. If anything will save us, that's it. It's the bottom line. And it's the usual environment of story that they will do not enough about the problem until it starts getting bad enough that they actually see economic losses due to the problem, and then they will scramble to self-regulate and do something that will improve it. And on that positive note, let's take a break.

And when we come back, we'll talk about implications for astronomy. I had this, like, overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call, said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation. And I just wanted to call on and let her know. There's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling. And there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation,

a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. I wouldn't have to go to any more funerals, you know.

I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it has echoed and revered.

reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told.

I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable.

These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught.

And I just looked at my computer screen. And I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, it's HoneyGerman. And my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back.

This season, we're going even deeper into the world. music, and entertainment, with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talked all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of Chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing vibras you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the

issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. But the whole pretending and code, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasasasas Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. says, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance, bro, tell you how to manage your money again.

Welcome to Brown Ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates, I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan, starting with your local credit union, shopping around online, looking for some online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to judge.

It is so expensive in these streets. I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt when it weighs on you. It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand. It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it. And in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Okay, so you mentioned a little bit earlier in the show that all of these Starlink satellites, for example, are making astronomy difficult. What is the magnitude of this problem? Right. Right now, it's an annoying nuisance, but again, up things by another factor of 10, and it becomes really difficult to do.

certain kinds of science. And so the problem is this. There are two problems. They're different for low orbit satellites and high orbit satellites. For low orbit satellites, they're so low that in the middle of the night, they can't see the sun. They shine by your affected light, and so they're dark. And so they're not really a problem for astronomers in the middle of the night. They are, however, if you have enough of them, for example, if this e-space company I mentioned really launches like 100,000 satellites, you could get to a situation where there are more visible satellites in the sky than visible stars. Oh, my God.

Especially, like, just at the limit of visibility, the sky, instead of being nice and dark, will be kind of seething in this nauseous way. And then the brighter ones will make it very hard to kind of recognize the constellations because it's going to be so much traffic. It's going to be like in the flight platform, I don't know, Logan Airport or whatever. But why are these things bright? I mean, they don't have lights on them, right? Are they just reflecting the sun?

They reflect sunlight and they're big. They're big and low. and they reflect sunlight. The current Starlink satellites are 30-meter span. Oh my gosh. Solar panels. They're not small. These are not tiny cubesats. They're one-ton-ish satellites. So it's really a change in the environment for everyone in the world, right? Even if you're not a space-faring country, but you're like looking up at the sky, you have cultural connections to the sky, and now suddenly you're seeing the sky changing. And one of my colleagues was just out hiking in the wilds of Canada, said, you know, they saw,

like so many satellites now that they would never have seen a few years ago. Can they do something on the satellites to reduce the reflectivity, like have an anti-reflective coding or a sunshade? To SpaceX's credit, they are doing a number of things that have reduced the brightness of the satellite. But then they came out with this new model of the satellite where they had these fancy new mitigations, but they were also twice as big. And so it kind of canceled out. To their credit, they've done a lot of work, but there's still more than needs to be done.

So then the second problem is the high orbit satellites, They are too faint, because they're high up, they're too faint to be seen by the average person looking up in the evening at the constellations, but they leave trails on astronomical images. They're way, way brighter than the distant galaxies that we're looking at. And so you take this picture of some distant galaxy, and you've got a big streak going across the image. And, you know, we're not just trying to take pretty pictures. We're trying to measure brightnesses of stars to like one or two percent accuracy.

And so just photoshopping out the trail doesn't entirely solve the problem. And even if that works, if you have one trail every five images, you do what we call medium filtering. Basically, you throw away the bad ones. And you just have to observe for longer than you otherwise would have. So it's a tax, but it's workable. But then, you know, if you up the number right so that it's like 10 streaks on every image, going crisscrossing, going every way, that becomes pretty impossible to analyze in an automated way. If you have like, you know, 10,000 images of galaxies and you're trying to analyze them remote with an algorithm and trying to distinguish between the criss-crossing satellite streaks and actual astronomical phenomena is going to get pretty impossible.

You know, there are some science that's going to be affected worse than others. The Magellanic clouds, our nearest galaxies, are visible high in the southern sky in southern midsummer. Southern midsummer is the worst for this because that's when the sun isn't that far. below the horizon, the satellites get illuminated all night long, and in plausible scenarios, five or ten years from now, there are several thousand illuminated satellites all the time in the sky throughout the night in midsummer. We may be able to work around it with new kinds of cameras that can turn their shutters off for brief moments of time while the satellite is passing, triggered maybe by a finder camera that spots the satellite coming over. It's not

trivial, that's money, right? That's money that we don't have to re-equip the observatories. So Musk said, quote, I am confident that we will not cause any impact whatsoever in astronomical discoveries, zero. How confident are you that that's the case? I am 100% confident that he is wrong about that. Okay. There are subtleties, right? And so, for example, there was a report of a flare in a Redshift 11 galaxy. There was super scientific. exciting until it turned out to be actually a satellite passing through the field of you at the telescope at the time. If you've just got like an optical fiber on the sky that you're taking a spectrum, right? You don't have an image of the sky. It's hard to figure out that that was a

satellite. So there's all kinds of ways in which this is like a new kind of contamination factor that ranges from mild annoying to, oh, we accidentally published a wrong exciting result because there was no way to tell that it was caused by satellite contamination. So if you were a dictator of the Earth and you were in charge of this and everybody had to follow your instructions, what would you do to allow us to have this amazing space technology and worldwide network and also do astronomy? Yeah, that's the challenge. I think we just need a cat on the number of active satellites of a given brightness and

a given altitude. You know, we have caps already, like in geostationary orbit, there's orbital slots that get assigned by the International Telecommunications Union. You can't just launch as many geostationary satellites as you like. I think we're going to have to go to that in low Earth orbit. We're going to have to have some kind of orbital slot thing. And that will then change the design trade so that instead of launching 10,000 small satellites, maybe you

launch 1,000 bigger satellites, and that helps with not bumping into each other as well. So I think it's a matter of finding regulation that will, yes, absolutely let the space technology develop, but not in a complete free-for-all way and manage the resources that we have in a sustainable way and in a way that doesn't impact the environment and astronomy more than a certain amount. Absolutely, it's going to be worse for us than it used to be, but I do believe there's a happy medium where the astronomers could just about kind of survive and the satellites can still

make bunches of money. So let's wrap up the show by asking the two questioners that we got from a listener. So Josh sent us two questions. Here we go. Besides the stuff that just orbits the earth, what happens to all the other stuff? Does it just go off into space, run into planets, moons, and stars? And parenthetically, I'm thinking that if they do hit planets and moons, they just sit there forever. And if they hit stars, I'm assuming they melt away. Right. Well, even if they hit a planet, you know, the typical planet hitting speed is going to be more than enough to pulverize here.

We have, in addition to the 25 something thousand objects currently in orbit, the 60,000 objects that have been in orbit since Sputnik, there's about 1 to 2,000 objects that we have sent beyond Earth orbit, either to the moon or into orbit around the sun. And they're poorly documented. I've been trying to make a catalog of them, figure out where they will are. Most of them will just orbit the sun forever. I say forever.

After a million years, there are various effects that will cause them probably to spiral into the sun or to hit a planet. But we're talking million-year timescales. These things are going to be out there for a while unless the Smithsonian goes and collects them or something. With their gigantic budget. Yeah, well, you know, a thousand years from now,

hopefully it will have a gigantic one or 100,000 years from now. We do have stuff in orbit around Mars, we have stuff in orbit around Jupiter, and we have stuff on the surface of the planets. Stuff you mean on purpose or space junk or both? Well, both, right? So we try not to have the space junk hit Mars because, and so what we do is when we send stuff out in the direction of Mars, we actually sterilize the probe, sort of bake it so that there's hopefully no bacteria on it so that we won't contaminate the search for Martian life,

with bugs from Florida. And then when we launch it, we actually deliberately aim it away from Mars a little bit. We deliberately miss a bit, separate from the rocket stage. So now the rocket stage is in an orbit that doesn't go close to Mars. And then we make a course correction to put the probe on course for Mars. And so that way we avoid having the big sort of space junk pieces that we launch in orbit around the sun hit Mars at least on the first time round.

You can't sort of predict far enough in advance to guarantee it'll never hit, but hopefully the bugs will be dead by then. So that is, you know, this whole issue of protecting the environment of the other planets. It's certainly something that people give a lot of thought to. But there is, yeah, there's a bunch of junk orbiting the sun. One of the things that I've been involved in is movement to try and regulate this better and at least get people to say what orbit they put their junk in so that we can find it later.

Occasionally we've accidentally cataloged space junk as, Oh, we discovered an asteroid. Oh, whoops, never mind. That asteroid isn't an asteroid. It's a rocket stage. We would like you, please, if you launch something in the orbit around the sun, give us the orbital elements so that we can disambiguate it from asteroids. There's an asteroid mining company that's explicitly said it wants to launch this survey probe next year,

and they're not going to tell us which asteroid is going to, because that's proprietary information. Right. I think that's just not okay. If you're flying a light plane in the U.S., you have to file a flight plan. You should have to file a flight plan if you go to the astronauts. That's public interest information. And so the American Astronomical Society has issued a statement saying that we think that interplanetary orbits, like the solar systems are our area. And if you're going to be in it, we think you should publish your orbital data and not keep it secret.

So we'll see if we can make that stick. but that's going to be an area of discussion in the years to come as more and more activity. You used to be that the Deep Space Arena was just NASA JPL and the Soviets, right? And now it's all kinds of developing countries. The UAE has a Mars orbiter. India has moon landers. And private companies like SpaceX are launching stuff to the moon and Mars. And so we really need to do a better job of keeping track of what's out there.

Yeah. And speaking of keeping track of what's out there, Josh's second question is right on point there. This is probably more speculative and harder to answer. But in the event of the existence of advanced extraterrestrial beings, what might they intuit about us if or when they do find the random fastener or rocket booster or humanoid poop? Would they be curious? Would they be bored? Would they be disappointed? We were so wasteful with the stuff we ejected into the space trash can.

Yeah, I think their attitude is going to be, well, that those guys went extinct. They were really... Well, I'm hoping our cleanup methods really get much better in the coming decades. Yep, you and me both. Yeah, fingers crossed. Have we had elements of space junk that we think have gone interstellar that have left the solar system, you know, basically the inverse version of

obelobes Omuamua? Yep, absolutely. There are a couple of pieces of the New Horizons probe, one of the rocket stages, and a couple of, there are things called de-spin weights that are like you have a spinning rocket stage, you want to slow it down, you unspool two weights on a wire, kind of like a yo-yo kind of thing, and then they float off and take the angular momentum with them. And so that's like another class of space junk. It's like little pieces of space junk that's just, okay, they're on their way out of solar system.

All right. So to wrap up, are you feeling optimistic about the future? Are we going to get those caps on satellites? What do you think? Before we go extinct. Yeah. I don't know, Kelly. I think that there is, you know, even in the companies, right, I don't want to paint

them as unfeeling corporate, you know, money is a little thing. They do care about space. And so I think there is interest in being responsible space citizens. And that, you know, gets balanced against all the pressures that are pushing them to be careless. And so I think it could go either way. It's the usual environmental thing. It will get bad enough that something will have to be done and then there will be a scramble to try and fix it. I think that's a very realistic take on things.

All right. Thank you so much for being here today, Jonathan. We had a lot of fun. My advice. Thank you for having me. Good luck tracking everything. Thank you. And listeners, if you're planning to launch anything into orbit, please please please.

Please let Jonathan know. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by IHeart Radio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you. We really mean it.

We answer every message. Email us. at questions at danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D&K Universe. Don't be shy.

Write to us. Hi, it's HoneyGerman, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grazias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition.

I haven't auditioned in, like, over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and trending, with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs. And, of course, the great bevras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Dresses Come Again on the I-Heart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell, and the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about... how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy, which is more effortful to use, unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier.

Ignoring is easier. Denials easier. Complex problem solving. Takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway.

We just welcomed one of my favorite. favorite people, an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show, and we had a blast. Take a listen. Sue and I were, like, riding the lime bikes the other day, and we're like, we're like, people ride bikes because it's fun. We got more incredible guests like Megan in store, plus news of the day and more. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network.

I always had to be so good no one could ignore me. Carve my path with data and drive. But some people only see who I am on paper. The paper ceiling. The limitations from degree screens to stereotypes that are holding back over 70 million stars.

Workers skilled through alternative routes rather than a bachelor's degree. It's time for skills to speak for themselves. Find resources for breaking through barriers at tailorpapersealing.org. Brought to you by Opportunity at Work and the Ad Council. This is an IHeart podcast.