Man-Made Debris Makes Space A Dangerous Place

The problem of man-made debris in outer space has made headline news over the last several months. After a collision of two satellites last month, it is estimated that there are now 300,000 sizable objects orbiting the Earth, including roughly 12,000 satellites, of which only 6% are still functioning.

The news of out of control space debris began several months ago. NASA was relieved when a 1000 pound ammonia tank thrown off the International Space Station during a space walk back in July 2007 did not strike land but splashed down without incident in the Pacific Ocean between New Zealand and Australia.

Last week news headlines featured a fragment of space junk from a piece of a rocket engine ejected into space in 1993, (about 5 inches in diameter) that threatened to collide with the International Space Station.

The close proximity of the space debris briefly forced three astronauts to evacuate the station and take refuge in an attached Russian spacecraft that serves as an emergency lifeboat. If the space station was hit, the astronauts could have undocked and headed back to Earth.

The threat to the safety of the astronauts was real since the debris was traveling at the speed of about 20,000 miles per hour. If the debris had struck one of the pressurized modules aboard the $100 billion space station, the crew would have been left with only 10 minutes of air. However, this time the debris missed, and the astronauts returned to the station after just 11 minutes aboard the Soyuz spacecraft.

The threat to the International Space Station and the crash of the ammonia tank from space into the pacific Ocean highlight a growing international problem of the safety of space because of man-made waste. The sad fact is that space shuttles on average already have to avoid space debris once a year.

There are various solutions to clean up man-made waste in space now being discussed by the International community in the UN’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

Some scientific proposals to solve the problems created by man-made space waste call for a cosmic cleanup of space debris while others focus on improving debris tracking through international tracing and information sharing.

Recently, the European Space Agency has begun a program of monitoring space debris and setting up uniform standards to prevent future collisions far above the planet. Launched in January, the 50 million euro ($64 million) program called Space Situational Awareness is a program designed to increase information for scientists on the ground about the estimated 13,000 satellites and other man-made bodies orbiting the planet.

Meanwhile, one retired rocket scientist wants to clean up the debris and not track it. He has proposed sending up giant squirt guns to blast water at space debris, sending each piece into such a low orbit that it would fall into the atmosphere and burn up.

The proposal by Jim Hollopeter would use aging rockets loaded with water to spray orbiting junk. His idea is that the extraterrestrial shower would gradually knock refuse down toward the atmosphere, where it would burn up, as would the launcher. The water would turn to steam.

Still other recent proposals to achieve a clean cosmos include attaching balloons to pieces of debris in order to bring them back to earth through atmospheric drag. Another proposal would use electricity on debris to bring it down.

Of course, to create a cosmos free of debris would now be very costly to the International community. So, the most likely solution is probably through worldwide monitoring of all the orbiting man-made space waste. It is a communication initiative that the nations of the world have not yet embraced even after decades of discussion.

The problem of space debris has been a topic at the UN’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space since the Sputnik launch in 1953. Fifty five years of discussion of the problem of space debris without any international consensus has led to the current dubious state of the cosmos.

Indeed, something needs to be done soon to clean up the orbiting mess or better track the path of the waste, because man-made debris has made space a more dangerous place.

http://www.eworldvu.com