The Looming Space Junk Crisis: It’s Time to Take Out the Trash

[KG]

On clear winter nights, when the trees are bare, Donald Kessler likes to set up a small telescope on the back deck of his house in Asheville, North Carolina, and zoom in on the stars shining over the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s not the most advanced home observatory, but the retired NASA scientist treasures his Celestron telescope, which was made in 1978. That also happens to be the year Kessler published the paper that made his reputation in aerospace circles. Assigned to the Environmental Effects Project Office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, the astrophysicist had gotten interested in the junk that humans were abandoning in the wild black yonder—everything from nuts and tools to defunct satellites and rocket stages the size of school buses.

In that seminal paper, “Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites: The Creation of a Debris Belt,” Kessler painted a nightmare scenario: Spent satellites and other space trash would accumulate until crashes became inevitable. Colliding objects would shatter into countless equally dangerous fragments, setting off a chain reaction of additional crashes. “The result would be an exponential increase in the number of objects with time,” he wrote, “creating a belt of debris around the Earth.”

At age 38, Kessler had found his calling. Not that his bosses had encouraged him to look into the issue—”they didn’t like what I was finding,” he recalls. But after the paper came out, NASA set up the Orbital Debris Program Office to study the problem and put Kessler in charge. He spent the rest of his career tracking cosmic crap and forming alliances with counterparts in other nations in an effort to slow its proliferation. His description of a runaway cascade of collisions—which he predicted would happen in 30 to 40 years—became known as the Kessler syndrome.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_space_junk/

[Demit]

1. Good article. But it's from 2010. Would be nice to read an update.

[Javaman]

4. Update:

there's even more junk now.

[Demit]

5. no doubt.

I meant an update on what NASA etc might be doing/have done about it. Wise guy

[Johonny]

6. There are guidelines in place

There are UN guidelines, NASA guidelines and USAF guidelines but there is very little that can be done to make the Chinese obey these things. People are working on ideas to retrieve old satellites but most of the policies today are kick the can policies and not real solutions. Meanwhile there is a growing interest in commercial launchers and a belief that the launch rate will increase dramatically in the next 25 years. So something has to happen for that to be true.

[Demit]

8. thanks, johonny

[ConcernedCanuk]

2. Did we not learn anything from Mount Everest?

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Nepalese Government requested to archive significant waste matter collected from Mt.Everest

Jun 1st, 2011 by Himalaya.


The Everest Summiteers’ Association (ESA), in collaboration with the government, Eco Himal, Nepal Mountaineering Association and Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, have brought tonnes of waste collected from Mount Everest to Kathmandu. As some of the waste collected include oxygen cylinders, helicopter debris, metals etc that dates back to as early as the 1950s, the association members have requested the Nepalese government to archive these in the museum.

http://www.explorehimalaya.com/blog/nepalese-government-requested-to-archive-significant-waste-matter-collected-from-mt-everest/
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April 22, 2010, 2:30 pm

Shouldering Waste on the Trek Down Mount Everest

By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF


The busy base camp at Mount Everest. The Nepalese authorities now require that expedition teams collect their solid waste and have it hauled out by porters or pack animals.

In 1963 — just 10 years after the first ascent of Mount Everest by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa guide -– a fellow climber, Dr. Barry Bishop, wrote in National Geographic that parts of the mountain had become “the highest junkyard on the face of the Earth.” Expedition teams were trashing Everest by wantonly disposing of empty oxygen canisters, torn tents and other rubbish at base camp and just a few thousand feet below the summit, Dr. Bishop reported.

Decades later, the world’s tallest peak remains under siege. Dozens of expedition teams attack the summit every year, carrying tons of gear and provisions and enlisting thousands of guides, porters and pack animals. Adding to the pressure on the greater Everest region are growing numbers of tourists who trek for weeks over ancient footpaths to the foot of the mountain, where they gaze up in awe at the roof of the world.

/snip/

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/shouldering-waste-on-the-trek-down-mount-everest/?_r=0
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We had polluted most of the Great Lakes by the 50's - I remember swimming bans because of it in my youth.

We were literally dumping our shit into it, first to the point where it wasn't safe to drink; that didn't stop us -

we continued until it wasn't safe to even SWIM in in some areas.

Now its chemical spills in the oceans, some dumping done on purpose, drains and spills from our tar sands - nuclear waste (nuclear is "clean" energy), right?

right.

Oh and don't forget our atmosphere - air not fit to breathe in many places - I remember "smog alerts" in California when I lived there in the late 70's.

Now fracking up our ground waters and aquifers for the almighty $$,

and so on . . .

So no, we ain't learning

(sigh)

CC

[lastlib]

3. ^ ^ ^ THIS!! ^ ^ ^ (K&R!)

(You ought to make this a separate thread!)

[ConcernedCanuk]

7. lastlib - feel free to make a thread based on my post wherever you want.

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Claim it as your own for all I care.

If it wakes up one person,

it's worth the time.

CC

[theHandpuppet]

9. I've wondered why people who carry this stuff up the mountains...

... can't carry their damn trash back down. They've turned these peaks into dumps. Selfish twits.