Don't Look Up

I subscribe to a newsletter called the Orbital Debris Quarterly News. It's a publication put out by NASA dedicated to a single topic: Space trash. And it is fascinating. You probably aren't aware of this, just as I wasn't for most of my adult life, but: At this very moment, our planet is being orbited by millions of pieces of junk. There are 25,000+ bathtub-sized objects and another 500,000 somewhere between a marble and a baseball, all traveling at 15,000 miles an hour, ten times faster than a bullet. There's also more than 100 million that are roughly the size of a grain of sand. Total weight of this orbital trash heap is approximately 9,000 metric tons. [1]

And occasionally this stuff finds its way back home. Just like ET.

Consider this mesmerizing video for a moment. This is a 3D map created by NASA to show all the crap that's currently spinning 200 miles over our heads.

Every single one of those dots is a piece of space junk — decommissioned satellites, discarded rocket boosters, fuselages, fuel tanks — that's fighting a doomed battle against gravity. And each year, 200 to 400 of them lose the fight. Most burn up in the atmosphere or land in the ocean; some, like this 10-foot tall chunk of a SpaceX rocket, find their way to sheep farms in Australia.

This is why we can't have nice planets.

Getting mighty crowded up there

The problem is not just that a flaming nugget of space garbage might one day bonk us on the heads. It's the danger these objects pose to projects like the International Space Station, where we are conducting a decades-long experiment on the impacts of near-zero gravity on the human body [2]. Multiple times a year, the ISS has to move out of the way of a piece of high-tech debris hurtling toward it. [3]

Remember the movie Gravity? George Clooney tooling around on his space throne, Sandra Bullock in yoga shorts? This ain't Hollywood, folks. Other low-earth orbit fender-benders, like rockets accidentally crashing into satellites, happen on a semi-regular basis, creating thousands of additional pieces of high-speed shrapnel.

Most of this junk was put up there by governments like the US, Russia, and China. Now it's private companies like SpaceX, Starlink, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic, and they're just getting started. The number of space launches have increased more than 10X over the last ten years. There are more than 9,000 active satellites circling the globe and dozens more major launches planned for 2024.

Who owns these companies? Technology mega-billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson, of course. Which means that our space trash problem is going to get a lot worse. Because if there's one thing that tech billionaires excel at (besides printing money), it's letting other people clean up their messes.

To the Moon, Alice

I haven't even gotten started on the Moon. Per Ars Technica:

Humans have left a lot of junk on the Moon, including spacecraft remains like rocket boosters from over 50 crashed landings, nearly 100 bags of human waste, and miscellaneous objects like a feather, golf balls, and boots. It adds up to around 200 tons of our trash.

Since no one owns the Moon, no one is responsible for keeping it clean and tidy.

There's not much you or I can do about this, besides maybe wearing a hardhat at all times. But this topic is picking up traction, and even government agencies not named NASA are starting to notice.

In researching this post, I found dozens of others on the same topic, most of them published within the last 12 months. The Washington Post did a groovy-looking interactive treatment here. That article points out that, 77 years after Sputnik was shot into space, the FCC issued its first fine against a satellite company (Dish Networks) for low-earth-orbit littering. It was only for $150,000 — a fraction of the cost of building and launching a comms satellite — but it's a start.

People like to celebrate the entrepreneurial spirit of private space exploration and the potential of the "low earth orbit economy," if that ever materializes. And hey, I'm as enamored with space travel as anyone. When Carnival Cruise lines announces its maiden voyage to the dark side of the moon, I very much look forward to buying tickets. [4]

But before we decide to colonize the moon or build a liberatarian utopia on Mars, we need to clean up the mess we've created closer to home. You want to privatize space travel and extend your technology empire into the heavens? Fine. But it comes at a cost. Somebody has to pay it. Why should it be us?

If you like this blog post, please share it with friends, loved ones, colleagues, distant relatives, and old high school flames you're cyberstalking on social media.

[1] These numbers are from NASA, but other estimates run much higher. According to the European Space Agency, there's an additional 100 trillion bits of low-earth-orbit flotsam too small to track.

[2] To wit: Your bones get porous, you lose muscle mass, your blood pools in unexpected places, your brain ages faster, and your heart grows weaker. In other words, it's not unlike sitting on the couch all day eating pork rinds and watching reruns of Survivor.

[3] They even have a name for this: Predetermined Debris Avoidance Maneuver, or PDAM.

[4] This is predicated on my winning the lottery first, but any donations to the cause will be gratefully accepted.