NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas - NBC on Earth: Environmental Concerns in Space

Episode Date: November 26, 2018

Two art projects aim to raise questions about what gets sent to space and what lingers after. Chief Environmental Affairs Correspondent Anne Thompson reports on how they’ve sparked debate among astronomers.

The project is a provocation. It's art that is out of this world. When it's launched into space, a sculpture will shine as brightly as a star. The orbital reflector is a sculpture designed for low Earth orbit. It's a small satellite, about 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters by 30 centimeters, that goes into a low Earth orbit and opens up to become a large diamond-shaped mirror

about 100 feet long and about 5 feet tall. But not everyone is looking at it in awe, especially astronomers. The nighttime sky is filled with natural wonder and beauty, and it's not blank in any way shape or form so we need to be very careful how we treat this the sky and back on earth a different art project calls attention to the growing problem of orbital debris people are always very surprised when I tell them that there

are a hundred million pieces of rubbish floating around Earth. Guys, I've got to tell you, I think my Spanish has escaped. Low Earth orbit, home to around 1,700 functional satellites and hundreds of millions of pieces of space debris has become an intersection of arts and science, rights and responsibilities. I'm Anne Thompson, and this is NBC on Earth. Earthlings have been launching satellites into orbit for military and commercial purposes for decades. Artist Trevor Paglen took 10 years to develop his sculpture, Orbital Reflector. It's designed to collect sunlight and reflect it down to Earth and become visible in the night sky as a kind of star about as bright as one of the stars in the Big Dipper, where it will slowly move across the sky and it will last

about eight weeks and then burn up in the atmosphere as if it had never been there. A satellite with no commercial or military purpose, challenging conventions about who gets to send what into space and why. I started thinking about this project about 10 years ago conventions about who gets to send what into space and why. I started thinking about this project about 10 years ago. And at that time, I was spending a lot of time looking at satellites and thinking about space

and really becoming aware of the degree to which space is really the realm of the military. You know, the first satellites were launched aboard ICBMs. And spaceflight wasn't developed for us to go and explore other worlds. It was developed to deliver nuclear warheads to the other side of the planet. Spaceflight, in a very real way, is a byproduct of the efforts to build the capabilities of nuclear warfare. And I was seeing a kind of new militarization of space occurring in the 2000s. And one of the things that I do as an artist is often look at something and try to imagine to myself what the opposite of that would

be. If I look at something that bothers me or that I'm critical of or that I want to bring attention to, I try to imagine what the exact opposite would be and imagine that as a way to try to undo common sense in a way. And so I started thinking about what it would be like to build a satellite that had no commercial function, that had no scientific function, that had no military function,

and this project developed out of that. When we look at space it has everything to do with military histories on one hand but also corporate histories. Space is a domain of communication and it's a space of surveillance quite honestly and really over the last 20 years or so we've seen the construction of vast planetary scale communications infrastructures and things like the internet and mobile phone networks and what-have-you and these are infrastructures that have surveillance as their core business model, whether that is a military agency like a national security agency,

or whether that's a Google or an Amazon. These are infrastructures that are designed to extract value from our communications, from the intimate facts about our lives that we share on them, and in a way to use that information against us. To either try to sell us things or to try to find vulnerabilities that we might have and sell that information to insurance companies or what have you. And I think of a lot of infrastructures as being quite predatory.

And for me, Orbital Reflector is a project to reimagine that. It's to try to develop something that has no ulterior motive. It's to develop a satellite that's not out to try to develop something that has no ulterior motive. It's to develop a satellite that's not out to get you, that's not trying to collect information from you, that's not trying to target a missile somewhere, that is really very simply a kind of mirror in the sky. A mirror in the sky that many astronomers are not happy about.

So I'm a huge fan of science-art collaborations, especially when they're done really well. Jackie Faraday is an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History. From the scientific perspective, anything launched into space is a problem for astronomers. I take telescopes, I take the world's most expensive, the world's humans most ambitious telescopes that are very costly to run per evening. I take those telescopes, I point them at distant objects, and I stare at patches of the sky in order to extract information. Anything that's between my telescope and my imager and that distant object is contamination. It's a problem. So artificial satellites, airplanes,

anything that humans have built that's taking advantage of the seemingly empty space is a problem for astronomers. So in this case the orbital reflector is not something astronomers want to have in the sky. I don't want to study it. It's not something that I can get anything out of scientifically. And when it streaks across an image that I'm taking, that image is fairly useless to me. It happens all the time. When I'm at the telescope, a satellite flies by, I throw that image out and I have to take another one. That takes my time, that takes the energy away from the scientific goals of what I'm trying to do. So in that perspective, an object launched into space is not something that is a good science art merger.

But Trevor Paglen thinks his artistic gesture will be worth it. You know, I think that that's what art making is. What we do is we make interventions into space, whether that's putting a painting on a wall or putting a sculpture in a public place or making some kind of monument out in the desert. That's what we do. And

the bet that you make as an artist is that that's worth it. And for me it certainly is. It's worth it for me because ideally it's a project that allows us to have exactly these kinds of conversations. And we don't have these kinds of conversations when the military puts up a satellite or when Elon Musk puts a frickin Tesla into space, you know, and I think like paradoxically by creating a gesture like this that really tries to not have other kinds of baggage. It's not an advertisement. It's not a weapon.

It's not a targeting device. It's not a communication thing. It creates more of a kind of blank slate that allows us to bring what our own concerns are to the project itself. And for me that's really a powerful thing that art can contribute to society. Paglen says orbital reflector will burn up harmlessly as it enters Earth's atmosphere just a few weeks after it begins to sparkle. But Jackie Faraday is skeptical. The consideration must be given to what you're doing up there in space. It will leave an imprint, and it will leave an imprint that we will have to deal with when we launch more and more scientifically productive things

or maybe humanity's decision to escape the planet or to explore the solar system. So from that perspective, I also caution, not just this particular artist, but anybody that's considering, this isn't the first person that's decided to do this kind of like not serving any functional purpose object, but just for the joy of looking at an object in the nighttime sky,

you've got to take this into consideration. You're doing far more than just up and back. There's a signature that gets left. And to remember also, there's no cleanup in space. You don't go up there after you've launched and maybe you scattered a couple of particles from your spacecraft. There's pieces of it that break off as you send the object out into space that remain. No one goes up there and cleans that up after. No one's doing that.

There's no, it just stays up there. There's so much junk up there. And more and more I encourage anybody that watches this to look this up at the awareness that NASA, that other countries, space agencies have of monitoring this space debris, which is every single day accumulating. And that we need, we're getting a heightened awareness of what we need to do to ensure that we're not damaging anything else that we send up later. The problem is big.

NASA says today around 1,700 spacecraft currently orbit the Earth, along with hundreds of millions of pieces of orbital debris, or space junk, defined as man-made objects in orbit about the Earth which no longer serve a useful purpose. 21,000 of those are larger than 10 centimeters, big enough to track. My name is Nick Ryan. I'm a sound artist and creator of Machine 9. More about Machine 9 in a few minutes. But first, why is space debris an issue?

Well, space debris poses huge risk to space operations. It tends to exist in particular altitudes, so low Earth orbit. There's a concentration of space junk around 800 kilometres in altitude. 800 kilometres in altitude is a critical band of space debris. And it's also an operational altitude for satellites. So for operational satellites, we have huge concern about collisions between satellites and space junk pieces. Even a tiny fragment of paint

can damage the solar panels on a satellite, for example. Space debris is a really enigmatic subject matter for an artist. Cath Lekuta, my co-artist on Project Adrift, was fascinated by space already. Her grandfather was an astrophysicist and she actually introduced me to this idea of space debris. I, like many people, knew very, very little about space junk. People are always very surprised when I tell them that there are 100 million pieces of rubbish floating around Earth. But for Kath and I, we were really interested in the poetry of space junk, if you like. Yes, it's an environmental disaster.

It's potentially one of the biggest environmental disasters facing humankind today. But it's also a very poetic thing, space debris. If you consider that space junk is a floating graveyard of space history, then it takes on a different connotation. All of these objects are beautifully preserved, floating around Earth, and they are a sort of catalogue of the history of space exploration. And they might be rubbish, but in their time, they represented the pinnacle of human innovation, you know, advances in material science,

advances in electronics and so on. But they're floating around Earth in this beautifully preserved atmosphere. So Kath and I were fascinated by this hidden world that we saw of space junk. And we kind of imagined that all these pieces of space debris had an individual story to tell. Vanguard, for example, which is the oldest satellite, a weather satellite launched in 1957. It has waggle antenna. It's a beautiful silver orb floating around space.

And it will continue to orbit for another 240 years until it finally de-orbits. So space debris is very variable in its consistency. There are all sorts of different things. Obviously, a lot of them are metal. And people kind of expect space junk to be metal but there are some very surprising objects which you might not expect. Crystals of urine for example which are ejected from the International Space Station are said to be extremely beautiful by astronauts but there's there's urea there is their thermal blankets heat tiles there was even a space suit which was pushed out of the international space station

by russian astronauts with a radio receiver embedded in it, as an experiment. Just imagine this kind of ghostly, empty spacesuit orbiting planet Earth. We were particularly interested in one object that was lost on a spacewalk. It was a spatula, which was being used by a British astronaut called Piers Sellers to remove some adhesive on the outside of the International Space Station. Guys, I've got to tell you, I think my spank should escape. And unfortunately, it became untethered and floated away from him to become a piece of space junk, quite a mundane piece of space junk,

this kind of insanely fast piece of kitchen equipment if you like, floating around Earth at four miles a second. Space junk flies at what's known as hypervelocity which is incredibly quick. It's so quick in fact that if you were an astronaut like Piers on a spacewalk and a piece of space junk flew past you, you wouldn't be able to see it. But of course at those speeds a collision with another object is cataclysmic and materials behave in very different ways at those speeds. They almost act like fluid. So if a spatula was to hit the International Space Station,

there would be an explosion and potentially a cataclysmic explosion. Not only is it the speeds that pose a big threat, but also it's the fact that space junk is flying in all sorts of different directions, or inclinations as they're called. So it's very, very difficult to predict what's going to hit when. And computationally, it's an extremely big problem. These sounds are from Nick Ryan's creation Machine 9, a sonic representation of space junk.

I was interested as a sound artist in this paradox that on the one hand space junk is highly energetic. It travels at four miles a second. Some of these objects are the size of buses. And yet it travels around Earth completely silently. It's out of our earshot. None of us are in orbit to hear it. But even if we were, it wouldn't generate any sound because space is a vacuum there's very little atmosphere for sound to be transmitted through so these objects are without voices and as a sound artist I thought there was a an interesting opportunity to give these voiceless objects some way of speaking.

And so what I wanted to do was build a machine that would transform these objects into sound as they orbited Earth. And I conceived of Machine 9, which is a giant cylindrical phonograph based on the idea of Edison's cylindrical phonograph which was a wax cylinder and it was a way of transcribing and reproducing sound. It consisted of a wax cylinder with a needle phonograph stylus much like we have on modern vinyl players and yet it traveled up and down the cylinder rather than from side to side as a record player would. This cylinder, Machine 9, is a giant aluminium cylinder two meters long and on its surface we've engraved a thousand sounds. Each of these sounds is three seconds long and as a piece of space junk flies directly

overhead the instrument one of the styluses will find a sound for that particular piece of space junk and the sound it finds for it will depend on its size. So all of the sounds are laid out from low to high just as a piano would be laid out. And depending on the size of space junk, the machine will play a high or a low sound. Tiny pieces of space junk will be represented by a tiny sound, high sound, and a giant piece of space junk, perhaps the size of a bus, will be performed by a very low sound. Sounds themselves, because space junk doesn't have a sound, are actually generated from objects which I invited my friends to send me,

which they thought looked like space debris. Rather than making up sounds myself, I wanted to actually ask people what they thought space junk was like. And so I invited 200 people to send me rubbish which they collected, which they thought looked or felt like space debris. And I received hundreds of pieces of rubbish. Many of them were metallic, which told me that people thought that space junk was metal, which it is. Some of them were more poetic.

So someone sent me a homing pigeon feather, this beautiful bird's feather. People sent me driftwood from the beach, polystyrene, pieces of aluminium foil, insides of cameras, circuit boards, switches, cables. And then I used a technique called a contact microphone technique to generate a sound signal from each of these objects by bowing them with a violin bow or flicking them with my finger or dropping them on the floor or setting them alight and all of these objects generated a thousand sounds and those 1,000 sounds are

engraved into the surface of the cylinder. The way that they perform depends on what space junk is flying directly overhead the instrument at any particular time. And depending on the size of the space junk, it gets allocated a sound which is mapped to its size, and the size is mapped to the pitch of the sound. But I should mention that we're not actually tracking the space junk live, because that's impossible. We take position reports from NASA and other organisations, which are published sometimes as frequently as once every couple of days,

and then we ingest those into a machine that we've invented called an orbital mechanics simulator, which is a piece of software. And that enables us to project their geometry into the future so we can actually determine where any of these objects is at any particular time. Nick Ryan hopes sounds from Machine 9 will create a connection for people to objects hundreds of miles away in space. As an artist, I think it's important to represent some of this scientific data in a different way. And Kath and I wanted to use a more poetic viewpoint

to explore the hidden world of space junk, which is a contemporary crisis, but it's also quite a poetic phenomenon and the scientists we collaborated with were really delighted that we were able to help them use a different language to talk and think about space debris the way that we represent space debris at the moment as scientists the way that scientists represent space debris is as a spreadsheet, for example, which tells us where space junk is in orbit. My machine represents it as a sound, which is a very different way of experiencing space debris. And I wanted to use sound to give people an impression of what these objects feel like rather than you know an impression

that's all about information so I hope that you know by creating a sensation of space debris people are sort of more emotionally engaged with this this this junk floating around earth that emotional connection to the night sky is something jackie ferrity hopes can be recovered and the people will gaze into space with a renewed sense of wonder the nighttime sky is a very precious beautiful canvas. It's something that is you can also look up at and just appreciate by staring at it but it's also one where the more you know the better it gets. The nighttime sky is filled with natural wonder and beauty and it's not blank in any way, shape, or form. So we need to be very careful how we treat this, the sky.

It's Van Gogh's Starry Night, but way better. For more on the orbital reflector, you can head to NBCNews.com. Thank you to Nick Ryan for the sounds from Machine 9, which will make an appearance in January at the Museum of New and Old Art in Tasmania. You can learn more about his and Catholic Cuda's work on space debris at projectadrift.co.uk. Other sounds are from NASA. For more on astronomer Jackie Faherty's work, head to jackiefaherty.com. This episode was produced and edited by MB Tool. Music by the Cosmic Piano.

I'm Anne Thompson, and you've been listening to NBC on Earth. Thank you.