Nearly everything we’ve sent into space is still there circling our planet. Huge amounts of abandoned old machinery just littering space. It really is a terrifying thought. When you’re going 17000 miles an hour it does not take a big piece of debris to ruin your day. The energy would be more like a 50 caliber Browning machine gun sniper round. Experts are now beginning to ask: Over the last several years, orbits around Earth have become littered with satellites and old pieces of machinery. Space junk is all the stuff that we’ve launched into orbit that no longer serves a useful purpose. So its satellites, its rocket bodies, its old gloves. Basically litter that we have left in space. Now, this isn’t a trivial issue because as we enter into a period of more rapid space expansion from space tourism to companies putting more smaller satellites into space, it’s now estimated that the number of pieces of space junk up there is over 130 million pieces that are orbiting the earth and that number is only growing. So space is being littered with these dangerous uncrewed pieces of machinery flying through space at breakneck speeds. It’s a lethal accident waiting to happen [Radio noise] In 2009, NASA actually had to order an emergency evacuation of the International Space Station when they discovered a piece of space junk about the same size as a CD traveling towards them at 8 km a second. We got a call that we we’re having a red conjunction. We’re looking around what the heck is a red conjunction now? Because we hadn’t really trained for it. It was a little bit chaotic because this was the first time we had had one of these. [Radio noise] It’s either going to hit or it’s not going to hit. And so worrying about it doesn’t help you. All you have to do is just prepare everything that you need to prepare so that if it hits, then you’re in the best possible configuration. Now, thankfully, the ISS wasn’t hit that time, but this is a genuine concern for NASA, ESA and other space agencies, because if it was hit, the damage would be catastrophic. It gets hit by something relatively small. Penetrates, but because the pressure inside it just forces the modules to open up. Just like a balloon bursting. And that happens extremely quickly and with no chance an astronaut in that module could could ever get out. In fact, you can recreate these kind of collisions in a lab and it really reveals how dangerous they really are. You see your screen flash up and it’s over. All that work is turned into this. So this piece of modern art here, if you can see it’s all splayed out. Now, that’s about 250 milligrams. So that’s a little bit bigger than, heavier than an ibuprofen pill. And the energy that would have on orbit at, say, 14 kilometers per second would be, well, the momentum would be about the same as a hot loaded 357 Magnum. So that’s a lot of momentum. And the energy would be more like a 50 caliber Browning machine gun sniper round. A single one of these collisions can create thousands of these tiny lethal fragments that act like space bullets that ripple out into space, causing unimaginable damage as they go. In fact, some forecasts suggest that a major collision like this could happen once every five years. And we see thousands and thousands of near misses every single day as a result of all the junk that we put up there. You end up in the situation where, you know, it’s basically a lottery in terms of whether or not your satellite is going to be hit. And this wouldn’t just cause issues up in space, with so much of our modern world dependent on satellites for things like navigation and the Internet, communications, weather forecasting. It would cause absolute havoc down here on Earth as well. Now, with more and more of these objects being blasted into space every single year its becoming a serious threat to modern life. So what can we do about it? Step one, it’s actually tracking all of this space junk. And that’s something that the US airforce has been doing for decades. “Prepass SVN 26, no time-critical commanding, no satellite conjunctions good on step six.” They’ve been cataloguing space junk since the early 80s. They started with 6,000 and had grown to 10,000 over the next two decades. And since 2009, the amount of trackable space junk has gone up by 20 percent to over 25,000 pieces. But the problem is, the only space junk that’s trackable is stuff larger than a cricket ball, and it misses those tiny, tiny fragments that can be incredibly lethal. So space agencies across the globe are working round the clock to come up with solutions to remove this space junk. One option to use a space harpoon. This system will capture those items of debris, tow them out of the orbits where they might collide with active satellites and allow them to burn up safely in the atmosphere. So the idea is to have a system which takes them away from where they cause a problem and basically destroy them safely. It’s a great idea. But the thing is, it’s a bit of a slow tactic because you have to remove everything piece by piece. And the problem is we’re putting even more space junk up there just to do this. Other plans include capturing them in a net or sticking a magnetic thruster onto them or even using solar radiation to sail them off into the sunset. It just shows, though, with so many of these ideas being developed, how dangerous of an issue this actually is. And if our quest to remove this junk fails and with the increase in objects littering space every single day, the question is: I want my kids and my kids kids to be able to explore space, and if we ruin the environment, we can’t do that. And that would be tragic because my passion for space came when I was 10 years old and I watched Apollo 11 and I watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon and that magic that created that feeling in me that said, I want to do space. I want my kids and my kids kids to have that opportunity. And if the space environment is ruined, that will never happen. So just like we’ve seen laws come in to protect our environment here on Earth, we could also see laws come in to help protect space and the environment around Earth with the hope of preserving the wonder and the beauty of the night sky for generations to come.
