Today, Explained - Space trash

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

Russia blew up a satellite and almost put the International Space Station in a precarious position. Recode’s Rebecca Heilweil explains how humans are trashing space. A space environmentalist (!) explains what cleanup might look like. Today’s show was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. Remember that one movie Gravity? Houston, I have a bad feeling about this mission. Sandy Bullock kind of stuck in space, needs a ride back to Earth. If you haven't seen it, you had eight years, and I'm about to drop a spoiler.

George Clooney's character drifts off into deep space in the movie because of a space collision. His character and Sandy's are performing some repairs on the Hubble telescope when a cloud of space debris comes out of nowhere and... ISS, this is Houston. Explorer, this is Houston. Mission abort. Repeat. Mission abort. there, and… George saves Sandy, but sacrifices himself. It's very sad. In the movie, this all happens because the Russians had shot down some defunct spy satellite. Crazy movie scenario, right? Except this just happened a few weeks ago in reality.

Hey Mark, good morning. Sorry for the early call. We were recently informed of a satellite breakup and need to have you guys start reviewing the safe haven procedure. It's 9.21. Seven astronauts aboard the International Space Station were still sleeping when they received a call from mission control on November 15th. To answer your question earlier about suits, we can't support you getting into suits at your discretion.

It's your call. Just note that the Soyuz crew is not in suits. Rebecca Highwell reported on this real-life gravity scenario for Recode. Russia launched what's called an anti-satellite test. So they basically launched a missile from Earth to strike down a really old satellite that they haven't used for quite some time. But they wanted to test to see whether they could do this. So they launched a missile, destroyed their satellite, and that created a bunch of different space trash. The U.S. State Department reports the blast created more than 1,500 fragments of space junk. Basically, when the satellite blew up, a bunch of shrapnel and pieces went spinning into Earth's orbit,

and that's really bad because those pieces go very, very quickly, and they basically would have hit the International Space Station and could have done real damage. When thousands of objects are moving at 17,500 miles per hour, even tiny pieces can become powerful projectiles. And this episode was really an example that humanity has not solved its space trash problem and that this is getting much worse and really dangerous for the people who live in space and all the different technologies that rely on satellites that are in space right now. There are probably a lot of people out there who don't even realize the human race has a space trash problem. So I want to definitely ask you more about that.

But let's just start with what exactly happened in this instance. Is the International Space Station okay? Are these astronauts okay? The astronauts are okay for now. Basically, every 90 minutes, the ISS was coming into near distance to this big flurry of space trash. But it seems like things are okay for now, partially because we have the technology to move the ISS when necessary and change its orbit a little bit so it doesn't have a collision.

But in the long run, this is really not a safe situation. Why did Russia just decide to launch a missile at one of its satellites? Is this like a regular occurrence for Russia or was it a special occasion? Did the satellite do something wrong? Russia has been testing this type of technology for some time. That is concerning both because the debris poses a risk to civilian activity in space, but it's also of concern because it demonstrates that Russia is now developing new weapon systems that can shoot down satellites.

Importantly, the U.S. has also tested tools like this. China has and India has. So this wasn't too surprising. But I think the, you know, secondhand consequences of blowing up a satellite are really scary and noteworthy. And that's why people are paying so much attention to this. Of course, the realization that another country has the capability to blow down potentially another country's satellite is super concerning as well. Russia's dangerous and irresponsible behavior jeopardizes the long-term sustainability of outer space and clearly demonstrates that Russia's claims of opposing the weaponization of space are disingenuous and hypocritical. This is just borders on terrorism to a certain extent because you're just wantonly blowing something up with the fragments going wherever they wish, and it's a threat that will continue to bother people for years. These missile tests that create

space trash don't happen so often, but once the trash is created, the trash can hit other trash, creating even more trash, and it's all spinning. And even earlier this month, the ISS had to adjust its orbital altitude by about a mile because it risked hitting space debris that was created by a missile test that China had operated back in 2007. So this trash stays up there a really long time and you have to deal with it for basically years after it's created. How often is all this space trash or debris getting in the way of, say, the International Space Station or other actually important operations up in space? It's an important enough problem that the government has to track it to basically adjust the altitude

of the space station. And a lot of the satellite networks that we also depend on also have to adjust their orbit. There's also the risk that it crashes into other space objects. The military has satellites in space that are really important for its purposes. There's commercial satellites that provide internet to people. The last danger, like I mentioned, is that the space trash that's going moving so quickly will hit other space trash. And basically, you know, if this keeps happening, could fill orbit with so much trash that you can't really put any stuff up there anymore. So we won't be able to put more satellites up there and use low Earth orbit for other purposes. I mean, thinking about like strategic military satellites is part of the problem here that a bunch of countries want to keep their satellites up in

the air to compete with their, you know, geopolitical rivals. Yeah. So I think that there is a huge international competition component to this. I think Russia in doing this to some extent was displaying a show of ability at least you know they took down this satellite which you know presumably endangered the ISS while you know their own astronauts were aboard the International Space Station and I think that to some extent is a show of confidence or something from the Russian government about their abilities in space but you know there's this underlying current here that the U.S. has a lot of satellites. We have this Space Force space. Force space.

Force space. That's sort of looking at the weaponization and the cybersecurity and the defensive abilities of U.S. operations in space. And other countries are also interested in doing that, too. So that adds a whole other layer to the space debris problem, where it's not just, oh, there's this really bad environmental impact for low-Earth orbit, but countries are competing with each other there, too. And is someone regulating it? No. And is someone regulating it? So there are treaties that govern certain aspects of what we can do in space, but space debris in particular is not something that is very clearly addressed by the space agreements that we do have between countries. And, you know, to some extent, there's a lot of pieces of space debris that aren't really even being tracked very well.

There are some pieces that are big enough to track, but a lot of them, you know, you couldn't really say, like, where this little piece actually originally came from. So it's a really, really big problem. It's kind of like climate change or a lot of the other environmental issues that we have where all of these different countries and now commercial firms, too, are creating this trash, and no one is really taking it into account or taking the responsibility to get rid of it

or handle it appropriately. In a minute, we'll talk to a spaceman about cleaning up space. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message,

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After this Russia space farce debris situation, we had to find out just how much trash is up there. So we asked Moriba Jha, Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at University of Texas at Austin. He also works with one of those billionaire space endeavors. Chief Scientific Advisor for Privateer. Now, the answer to the question. So the answer is not great. Right now, we're currently tracking upwards of 30, 35,000 pieces of stuff ranging in size from cell phone to the space station, of which only about 4000 are satellites and things that are actively controlled and providing services that we care about, and everything else is garbage. And how did it all get up there? Well, you know, it all started with this one satellite called Sputnik in 1957. And we just kept on launching more and more things, mostly dominated by governments. But now, as of the past few years, that's shifted towards

commerce. And so companies are really launching satellites to provide global internet and these sorts of things. And the thing is, is that we have these highways in space, I call them orbital highways, where we put these satellites, and these highways are becoming more and more congested, because as opposed to highways on earth when your car runs out of gas on the freeway if you can you try to veer off to the side of the road and get out of the way of harming other people and even getting harmed yourself but in space when things die they just keep on going at the same speed and there's no off-ramp, so to speak. And so for a lot of the objects, it's like, oh, okay, I'm just driving on the freeway. Oh, I just saw something like zip past me with no driver.

So that's the problem. And tell me what kind of problems these satellites spinning around our planet on this highway with no driver have caused thus far. The last time that we had a major encounter between debris and something we cared about was in 2009, a dead Russian satellite, Cosmos, collided with a U.S. communication satellite, Iridium, and pretty much wiped that thing from being useful. U.S. officials tell CNN this collision between an American and a Russian satellite in space brought together the force of two objects, each weighing more than 1,000 pounds,

at a speed of more than 20,000 miles an hour. That's around six miles a second. An outside expert tells us just how violent this silent impact was. Would have created thousands of pieces of debris that would have scattered in many different directions within a general orbital plane. So I was like the last major collision between something dead and something alive. But in 2007, the Chinese blew up one of their own satellites in a high orbit and a lot of those debris remained. So when people blow up their own stuff, that's a problem. You know, I started the show talking about how we lost George Clooney, at least in the movie Gravity, to like a rogue piece of space

trash. What are like the worst case scenarios in, you know, reality? So there's a lot of uncertainty. Some people actually believe that we know where everything is all the time up in space and we don't because we don't have eyes watching all the orbits all the time. And the way these things move, there's this science called astrodynamics, which is the science of motion of stuff in space. There are a lot of things contributing to the motion that we're just unaware of as well. So we're not all knowing it turns out. And because we're not all knowing, and there's uncertainty, one of these things could actually smack the space station and cause loss of life. And we weren't able to predict it. So it's kind of like the black swan thing that we hope never happens. So worst case scenario is loss of human life, you know, especially if we can't predict that it's going to happen. Is it possible that all of the space trash could eventually cause like all of our satellites to

fail and then we can't launch new ones because it's like a sphere of like supersonic trash surrounding the earth? I mean the likelihood of that catastrophic event happening is really close to zero. However, on the path that we're at, if we do nothing different, it will become that way, guaranteed. I mean, eventually there'll be enough trash

to where that's the reality. Yeah. I mean, we hope it'll never happen, but the situation's about to get much worse, right? Elon Musk wants to send a ton of satellites up. Amazon wants to send a ton of satellites up, right? So there's just going to be a ton more space traffic and space debris and eventually space trash circulating around the planet. Well, so let's put it this way. The number of objects in and of itself isn't the issue. It's the lack of coordination and planning because look, we have air traffic,

right? And we actually can pack quite a few planes on the air highways. We kind of phase these things and you go to any major airport and you see these things landing, you know, every, every, you know, 60 seconds, there's a plane coming in at certain times of the day. We can do something similar in space and actually facilitate, you know, global science and technology, making a difference, a positive difference in humans' lives. So the number of objects in and of itself, isn't the problem. It's lack of coordination, planning, lack of a jointly holistic, you know, managed resource, which is near Earth space. And I think we can do so in ways that are sustainable.

So what should we do instead? So I think a couple of things. One, we need to really try to monitor and assess and quantify what's up there. Who does it belong to? What is it doing? We need to use that to enable better prediction. Where are things going to be over the next days, hours, weeks kind of thing? And then can we develop evidence that can be used to help people be safer, but also be used

to hold people accountable for their behaviors in space? So we need to be able to do that. And honestly, just asking people to do it, pretty pleased with sugar on top, that ain't gonna cut it. So it's very clear to me that what we need to do is somehow find a way to recruit empathy across humanity and persuade every person to embrace stewardship as if our lives depended on it.

Wow. Like that's the thing that I'm after. That sounds nice. But I mean, we haven't done a great job of that on planet earth. Do you think we can do a decent job of it in space? You know, as an evangelist in this whole area, man, I have to believe the answer is yes. And it's not too late to do something. I want to empower people with knowledge and awareness and maybe even find ways of coming into their homes on streaming video and things like that to see if there's a way that I can

cause an inner shift in people to create that empathy required for action to take place. Do you think it's hard to get people to care about this because, you know, most people on earth aren't going to be affected by space debris? Well, so that's the interesting thing is that I want to show them that in reality, they are being affected and will, especially those people that rely on position navigation and timing, which look, everything from trains and planes, you know, delivery services rely on that. The financial transactions, the ability to just get on your cell phone and use Apple Pay and these sorts of things. A lot of that is routed through

space-based systems. Even like the idea of monitoring, you know, for climate change and, you know, disaster relief and how to best use our land for agriculture and these sorts of things. All of that data comes from satellites that can look even, you know, underneath the earth and the soil and look at the different constituents. And so people are actually benefiting from space-based technology every day. And the thing is, nothing protects or guarantees these satellites from working, especially if they get slammed by a piece of junk. But you're like, you're in Austin, you're working with Steve Wozniak, with Privateer. I imagine

you know Elon Musk. Do you get the vibe that these are empathetic dudes? Elon doesn't look terribly empathetic on Twitter. So I haven't met Elon yet. Maybe that will change. I do speak to people within SpaceX and the people in SpaceX that I deal with are empathetic human beings. So that's great. I can tell you that I would have never in a million years signed on to doing this with Woz and with Alex had they not been empathetic as well. In fact, they said, look, we're like the three amigos tied to the hip with this idea of environmentalism and such. So for sure, they're on board with that. But yeah, there are many people that don't have that empathy

and they're not necessarily purposefully non-empathetic. They just don't know. Well, I wish you the best of luck, man. It seems like a noble cause. Well, I really appreciate the nobility in it. I guess one thing that I want to say for sure is this has been demonstrated to us successfully over history. And I think if we can look at this idea of embracing stewardship, we could apply those principles to achieve sustainability, not just land, air, and oceans, but also space. More about Ja, he dreams of a better space and a better Earth, sometimes at the University of Texas at Austin, sometimes for privateer.

Our show today was produced by Hadi Mawagdi. He's still trying to find a space in Austin. Hit him up with your tips. I'm Sean Ramos for him and some exciting news about our show here. I mentioned to you a while back that we were looking for a co-host. Well, we found her. Her name's Noelle King. You might know her from the radio. If you listen to Morning Edition on NPR, you might know her from the podcasts. If you listen to Up First, soon, you'll know her real well from Today Explained,

which is also going to be on the radio sometime soon. Keep an eye on this space in the new year for Noelle. We can't wait for you to meet her if you haven't yet. Thank you.