Space: Our Most Exciting (and Risky) Adventure
Space travel is amazing, maybe the most exciting thing humans have ever tried. But here’s the weird part – the more we go to space, the more we might be setting a trap that could stop us from going altogether.
Every time a rocket launches or a satellite goes up, we’re adding to a problem in space that gets scarier each year. If this problem gets really bad, it could end the Space Age and keep us stuck on Earth for decades, maybe even hundreds of years.
Getting There Is Hard (Staying Is Easy, Maybe Too Easy)
First off, getting anything into space is super tough. You need to go incredibly fast.
- Go straight up fast to get through the Earth’s blanket of air (the atmosphere).
- Then, turn sideways and keep going really, really fast to start circling Earth.
If you get this right, you reach Low Earth Orbit (LEO).
Once you’re in LEO, it’s actually hard to get out unless you have extra power. You’re kind of stuck there, just falling around the Earth forever.
This is great for things we want to stay up, like space stations and satellites. That’s why most of humanity’s space stuff is here, just a few hundred kilometers up. It’s high enough that the air is so thin, orbiting things can stay up for ages before air resistance eventually slows them down enough to fall back to Earth.
The Space Junkyard: Where the Trap Begins
But this exact spot is also where our big problem comes from. Rockets are basically metal cans holding a lot of fuel. As they burn fuel, they drop the empty tanks to get lighter.
- Some dropped parts fall back to Earth or burn up in the atmosphere.
- But most of the useless rocket parts stay up and start orbiting the planet.
After decades of sending stuff up, Low Earth Orbit is now a junkyard. It’s filled with:
- Spent rocket boosters
- Broken satellites
- Millions of pieces of junk from missile tests and explosions
The Scale of the Problem (and the Speed)
Right now, we know about:
- Around 2,600 dead satellites
- 10,000 objects bigger than a computer monitor
- 20,000 objects as big as an apple
- 500,000 pieces the size of a marble
- At least 100 million pieces too small to track
All this junk is moving incredibly fast – up to 30,000 km/h. It circles Earth on paths that cross each other many times a day.
These orbital speeds are so high that getting hit by even a tiny piece of debris, maybe the size of a pea, is like getting shot by a plasma gun. The debris vaporizes on impact, releasing enough energy to blast holes straight through solid metal.
Our Valuable Stuff Is In Danger
So, we’ve covered the space around our planet with millions of deadly pieces. And then, right in this dangerous zone, we’ve put a trillion-dollar global network of infrastructure.
This network does super important jobs for modern life:
- Global communication
- GPS and navigation
- Collecting weather data
- Looking out for dangerous asteroids
- All sorts of scientific discoveries
These are things we’d really, really miss if they suddenly stopped working.
There are about 1,100 working satellites up there. If just one of them gets hit by a pea-sized bullet, it’s instantly destroyed. Already, about three or four satellites are destroyed this way every year.
Approaching a Tipping Point
The number of satellites and the amount of junk are expected to increase tenfold in the next ten years. This means we’re getting close to a critical point.
The Real Nightmare: A Collision Cascade
The absolute worst thing isn’t just tiny pieces of junk hitting satellites one by one. The worst would be an unstoppable chain reaction that turns lots of non-junk things into more junk.
Imagine two satellites hitting each other just right. Because they’re moving so fast, they don’t just stop. It’s more of a “splash” than a crash. The solid parts blast through each other, turning the two satellites into clouds of thousands of little pieces. And these pieces are still moving fast enough to destroy more satellites.
This could start the most destructive, slowest kind of domino effect: a collision cascade.
- Each collision creates more “bullets.”
- What started as one small target that was unlikely to hit anything becomes a wall of destruction looking to make more debris.
- As more satellites are destroyed, the destruction happens faster and faster, like an exponential increase.
- Eventually, it could destroy everything parked in orbit.
Space is huge and empty, so the first few collisions might take a long time to happen. But by the time we see what’s really going on, it might be too late.
- One year, one satellite is lost. No big deal.
- The next year, five.
- The year after, fifty.
- Eventually, there’s nothing left.
The Trap Closing In
The situation in orbit is getting worse fast, and we might even be past the point where we can easily fix it. Within 10 years, the space around Earth might not be usable for satellites or rockets over the long term.
The worst-case scenario is scary: a huge field of debris made of hundreds of millions of pieces, many too small to track, all moving at 30,000 km/h. This would create a deadly barrier around Earth that might be too dangerous to fly through.
- Dreams of moon bases, Mars colonies, or any kind of space travel could be pushed back centuries.
- Losing our space infrastructure would also knock out some of the technology we use every day, sending us back to the 1970s for things like communication and navigation.
Can We Clean Up Our Mess? (Some Wild Ideas)
It might not be too late to do something. While the space industry is trying harder to avoid creating new junk, the amount of debris is still growing quickly. Occasional weapon tests in space definitely don’t help.
Because of this, people have come up with some pretty wild, but also serious, ideas for how to clean up as much deadly space junk as possible quickly, without making more junk in the process. Lots of ideas are being discussed.
Seriously Considered Cleanup Methods
Some of the most serious ideas involve capture and return missions. These are being tested right now.
- Nets: One idea is to send a small satellite with a net to meet a piece of junk in orbit. Once caught, a small rocket on the cleaning satellite could fire to bring the captured junk down towards Earth.
- Harpoons: For targets too big for a net, a harpoon on a rope might be used instead. The cleaning satellite would harpoon the junk. Instead of using a rocket, it could then deploy a large sail attached to the junk. This sail would create air resistance (atmospheric drag), making the junk’s orbit decay faster and bringing it down.
There are also lots of other ideas that sound like they’re from a science fiction movie:
- Giant Electromagnets (Magnetic Tugs): These wouldn’t need to touch the junk. They could use magnetic forces to push on the magnetic parts inside satellites (which satellites use to stay stable and point correctly using Earth’s magnetic field). This might be safer than nets or harpoons because there’s no risk of accidentally breaking the target into more pieces by making contact.
- Lasers: Lasers could be key for getting rid of the tiniest bits of junk by vaporizing them completely. Satellites equipped with lasers wouldn’t need to travel to their targets; they could shoot them from a distance. Lasers can’t really shoot down huge objects, but they can be used to ablate them – essentially burning off tiny amounts of material from one side to give the junk a push into a safer orbit where it will eventually fall.
The Clock Is Ticking
No matter what technology we end up using, we need to start doing something soon. We need to act before those 100 million tiny pieces become a trillion, and the trap is fully set.
If we don’t do anything, our adventure in space might end before it’s even truly begun.