It seems that so soon after an ‘accidental’ *cough* space collision we have had a near miss on some space debris by the ISS.
It surprises me how much litter is floating around in space. I look at it simply it’s a large area, people don’t tend to throw things out of spaceship windows and we haven’t really spent a lot of time up there.
We must be right litter bugs though because there are over 600,000 bits of debris over 1cm floating around large enough to be a danger. These range from old satellites to debris from anti satellite tests. Each one a potential danger and one shuttle launch had the risk as a 1 in 185 chance of catastrophic impact. I though litter was bad where I live but I suppose it is only because a shard of metal travelling at 20,000 mph hitting a space station or satellite travelling at 20,000 mph in the opposite direction is a bit more of a deal than me looking at a fag packet blowing in the street.
Now it appears so bad that debris from space has actually threatened air traffic where a Russian satellite passed dangerously close to a Chilean Airbus A340 as it made the mistake of flying over an area popular for dropping space debris into the sea. Of course we need to bear in mind what happened in Australia when Skylab came tumbling down. Even on Earth we are not safe. Read a bit more about Space Debris here.
So it seems that everyone with an interest in space travel (and maybe airlines) is looking at setting up their debris monitoring database. Europe and China are investing money here. I only hope that we can share our databases to make sure that we don’t miss anything.
Hopefully, in the future, we can actually get someone to go out there and tidy up all the dangerous debris. Fifty years ago one of the most virgin areas on, or above anyway, this planet and we have made a right mess.
I wonder what it will be like once we have these ‘space tourists’ going on trips. That is if they will let them go because by the time they get the technology ready for space hotels etc. all the junk up there will make the risk for a catastrophic impact almost a certainty.
Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad name. — Henry Kissinger
We really are litter bugs
It seems that so soon after an ‘accidental’ *cough* space collision we have had a near miss on some space debris by the ISS.
It surprises me how much litter is floating around in space. I look at it simply it’s a large area, people don’t tend to throw things out of spaceship windows and we haven’t really spent a lot of time up there.
We must be right litter bugs though because there are over 600,000 bits of debris over 1cm floating around large enough to be a danger. These range from old satellites to debris from anti satellite tests. Each one a potential danger and one shuttle launch had the risk as a 1 in 185 chance of catastrophic impact. I though litter was bad where I live but I suppose it is only because a shard of metal travelling at 20,000 mph hitting a space station or satellite travelling at 20,000 mph in the opposite direction is a bit more of a deal than me looking at a fag packet blowing in the street.
Now it appears so bad that debris from space has actually threatened air traffic where a Russian satellite passed dangerously close to a Chilean Airbus A340 as it made the mistake of flying over an area popular for dropping space debris into the sea. Of course we need to bear in mind what happened in Australia when Skylab came tumbling down. Even on Earth we are not safe. Read a bit more about Space Debris here.
So it seems that everyone with an interest in space travel (and maybe airlines) is looking at setting up their debris monitoring database. Europe and China are investing money here. I only hope that we can share our databases to make sure that we don’t miss anything.
Hopefully, in the future, we can actually get someone to go out there and tidy up all the dangerous debris. Fifty years ago one of the most virgin areas on, or above anyway, this planet and we have made a right mess.
I wonder what it will be like once we have these ‘space tourists’ going on trips. That is if they will let them go because by the time they get the technology ready for space hotels etc. all the junk up there will make the risk for a catastrophic impact almost a certainty.