The trash problem is literally out of this world

Carter Henry

It’s no secret that humans are a little bit irresponsible when it comes to disposing trash. So it’s no wonder that we have been getting increasingly more creative on how we deal with waste. You can find trash on streets, in houses, landfills and oceans. But I bet you never expected that you can find it in space too.
So lets first take a good look at when this all started. I’m going to take you back to the year 1970, at the height of the Cold War and the space race. At this time Russia and the United States are both doing everything they can to get into space and get on the moon. What we do know, is that we did succeed in doing it. What you weren’t told is how many times we shot a satellite into space and got it stuck there. Here’s a rough sketch to give you an idea of how bad it is:


Space trash isn’t bags of trash floating around space. There’s no banana peals and diapers in orbit right now. Instead, there’s literally thousands of broken satellites, pieces of rockets and all sorts of gadgets. These pieces have a tendency to collide in orbit, and split into even more pieces of trash all moving at high speed. Currently, NASA is tracking abut 21,000 objects that are about 10 centimeters in diameter. However, there’s hundreds of thousands of even smaller things that have split off from larger things just out there. These can’t really be tracked because all of these objects are traveling at speeds of about 22,000 mph.



So why is this such a big deal? Well things in our atmosphere don’t always stay there. Often times they will get yanked back down to earth and burn up in the atmosphere. Releasing all those chemicals and metal shards into the air and back down to the ground. That’s just what happens on the ground. The poor scientists on the International space station have to act fast in order to avoid space trash. One NASA scientists stated that “a 10-cm sphere of aluminum can hit the space station with a force of 7 kilograms of TNT”
All this space trash has made coordinating space travel exceptionally difficult. If things don’t change, within a few years our lower orbit will be inaccessible. Meaning we are pretty much stuck here, and colonizing other planets becomes impossible.
The good news is that we have a few solutions to this problem. Unfortunately Europe is leading the way with... This:


Lots of room for improvement.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/10/24/space-is-filling-up-with-garbage-heres-why-we-should-tax-it/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.06cf83863396

Comments

Anonymous said…
I think the first time I realized that this was a true problem was when I watched the Sandra Bullock movie Gravity. While movies may exaggerate certain things, after reading your article I understand that this is truly a major issue. I think that by reducing the amount of chemicals we use in the production of these gadgets and electronics, we will be able to reduce our environmental impact. However, as technology improves, I feel as the number of satellites will only increase, so it may be a while before the general human population recognizes this issue. But through research and development regarding more environmentally friendly space materials, we might be able to reduce our environmental influence.
May 6, 2019 at 11:19 AM
Anonymous said…
I think that this issue is a issue which is overlooked a lot. I knew that there were some failed attempts to put satellites into orbit, but I never realized the staggering amount that didn’t work. Unfortunately, I am pretty sure this issue will continue to be overlooked as satellite production is only going to increase. Also, people really do not care about issues that do not effect them. As long as one of those pieces from space don’t come crashing down into their house, they are not going to care. In order for people to see how this is damaging, we need to show them evidence of destruction and how this is potentially a massive problem. Hopefully, while technology improves, we can find alternatives to putting satellites into space. I did not know that space trash can potentially close our access to outside Earth. That is scary considering there are so many people researching planets and solar systems and galaxies outside.
May 6, 2019 at 4:39 PM
Anonymous said…
Space trash seems to be en extreme problem, but there doesn’t seem to be be much we can do about it. I think the best way to fix this problem to first to spread awareness about it. I didn’t know the extent of junk in space until I read this post. The more people that know about this problem, the more we can start implementing ideas on a national or even global scale to combat it. A giant net seems a bit primitive, but it actually seems like the easiest and most efficient way to capture space trash and safely bring it back down to earth where it will be a little less of a problem. Another solution could be burning the pieces up, but again, that would release harmful chemicals into our atmosphere, something we don’t really need more of. There seems to be a lot of work to be done about the issue, but the best thing we can do is let people know about what’s really in space.
May 7, 2019 at 9:32 AM
Anonymous said…
I honestly never thought about space trash until now. Of course I knew that there were failed missions into space, but for some reason I always assumed that they were taken care of. This mindset is common among many Americans. We know that things create trash or waste, but we assume that it will get cleaned up in some way or another. This ideology leads to more issues. Although the net that is currently being used to clean up space trash seems kind of dumb, it’s only the first of it’s kind and there will likely be improvements. This is yet another example of humans causing environmental problems and then scrambling to find ways to fix them.
May 7, 2019 at 10:43 AM
Anonymous said…
Space trash is something that I haven’t really considered. This is just a form of littering, but taken outside of our Earth. As humans we have always been cluttering the earth and we took this to space as well. As we advance this seems to be inevitable as scientists are releasing these pieces of technology and if it gets lost they just send out another one. Maybe if we sent something out to go and collect the space trash we would be able to limit this, but the concern then would be that this trash is now located on Earth. Recyclable materials would be optimal so if we can get these back to earth we can reuse them. Research will always be in progress, and the way to limit this only seems to be longer lasting and better technology that will be less prone to get lost.
May 7, 2019 at 11:28 AM
Anonymous said…
I’ve never really thought about the downsides of throwing our trash into space. I just thought of it as an easy fix to a big problem. However, that’s the problem. Us humans are always trying to do whatever is most convenient only after we’ve already created a problem. Rather than initially just trying to produce less waste, we come up with this “fix” which just ends up causing more problems. If there is a way to safely control all the trash that we want to put in space, then it sounds like a good idea.
May 9, 2019 at 8:47 AM
Anonymous said…
The fact that the world has interpreted space as just a place to store our trash shows the massive problem that we have with how we see our environment. Rather than trying and reduce trash, we are simply polluting a different place. Just because we cant directly see the impacts of polluting space does not mean that it is not harmful. The United States and other countries should formulate a device and plan to capture the trash in space and find a way to properly dispose of it. This would make space more safe for our astronauts and the world.
May 9, 2019 at 11:26 AM
Anonymous said…
Us as humans ruin everything. however, the amount of trash we deposit into our Earth is the worst deed we have ever committed. We keep trying to make our lives easier and we don’t realize we are making it worse. We simply make our lives harder in the long run. The ideology of keep making makeshift solutions will be the death of us. Our ideology is so screwed up and it makes our problems harder by the day.
May 9, 2019 at 1:22 PM
Anonymous said…
It was very surprising that there are trash even in space. I did not know about that. In my opinion, the things that we can do individually to help reduce the amount of trash in space is very limited. There isn’t really anything specific that we can contribute or take action. I also believe that although space trash could be a problem, but the major problem that we must focus is not the space trash but rather the trash on earth. We must focus on improving the environment through finding better ideas to get rid of landfills, better ideas to recycle, and better ideas to dispose any trash that we produce on earth.
May 10, 2019 at 2:57 PM
Anonymous said…
I am surprised that the space trash problem is that bad. I've heard before of a few satellites breaking in space, but I did not realize the severity of the problem. The amount of trash depicted in that image is horrifying. If something is not done about it soon, we will have drastic consequences, like the inability to travel into space as said in the blog. I'm not sure that there is much that can be done right now to clean up the trash problem, but there are certainly precautions that we can take to prevent further trash in space. Something needs to happen soon before it is too late and we have ruined our chances of space exploration.
May 12, 2019 at 8:39 AM
Anonymous said…
Earth¹s gravitational field pulls a lot of space trash into lower and lower orbits until it finally reaches Earth's atmosphere. Most of the trash burns up when it enters Earth¹s atmosphere but it seems that The main problem with space trash is the danger it poses to working satellites and manned spacecraft. We spend anywhere from millions to billions of dollars to build and produce this technology and there is also the threat of not being able to travel in space anymore. This poses a serious problem that seems impossible to be solved and it seems that it will take years and years to solve. Something needs to be done now or we can kiss space travel goodbye.
May 12, 2019 at 5:19 PM
Anonymous said…
I'm not sure that this issue has much of a solution at the moment. However, it is necessary to attempt take steps to reduce the materials floating in the atmosphere due to the negative effects it has on space travel. The current solution seems very primitive, which makes me believe that we are a long way away from finding an effective solution for this problem. In the future, countries need to be extra cautious about what they are sending up into space. This will at least help to reduce the amount of "trash" entering the atmosphere, which will make the removal of it much more manageable.
May 12, 2019 at 10:09 PM
Anonymous said…
Space trash is overlooked by most [people because though it does add to the growing number of chemicals and greenhouse gasses in the air, its not as effective at destroying the planet unlike our CO2 emissions. We should try to reduce what\’s going on in space travel and what we put out in space, however thinking about this issue will be more pressing when we start exploring other planets rather than right now in the moment. We should focus on what’s happing on Earth first.
May 13, 2019 at 9:46 AM
Anonymous said…
It’s easy to forget about space trash because we don’t really see it around us on our earth. And a lot of it is just electronic parts from satellites and stuff. It is good to learn about our planet and our solar stystem from satellites and they’re great prices of technology. I do not think that we should stop using technology like this but we should go retrieve it once we are don’t using it instead of letting it float into space. The thing is that it will not just float off into the far depths of space, this space junk will stay in our orbit and is never really gone.
May 13, 2019 at 10:41 AM
Anonymous said…
I think this is a topic that isn’t talked about much since it’s something that does not impact us directly that we know of. Since this is something that is unknown I think we have been taking it for granted, but since we do not know the repercussions we must reduce and limit the waste in space as much as possible. We do not know what we are hurting therefore we must be considerate and logical and be very careful of what we release.
May 13, 2019 at 11:03 AM
Amogh Gokhale said…
Just like the movie Gravity, we can't really comprehend just how fast this trash is moving, and the dangers it provides to astronauts. We also don't think of it coming back down, when a majority of those materials are metal or plastic, and their burning up in the atmosphere can ause serious harm that is yet to thought about. We also saw this in Wall-e, and the huge amount of trash just engulfing the Earth. In order to prevent such a tragedy, we must come up with solutions to this problem.
May 13, 2019 at 3:36 PM
Anonymous said…
Space trash is a issue that continues to orbit our collective attention, and within times it can again move out of perspective. In the past we have seen this happen in many ways: The earth's surface has been covered with debris for thousands of years, the Earth's crust has been eroded by earthquakes and other natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, the Earth's oceans are being polluted by oil spills and other pollutants, The Earth's atmosphere is becoming more acidic due to global warming and other environmental problems, and lastly the ozone layer is thinning which in result is causing an increase in global temperatures. Main solution to this issue is to consider the negative impacts before sending things such as satellites into space.
May 13, 2019 at 6:00 PM
Anonymous said…
Issues such as space trash are unknown to the general population of America simply because we do not suffer from it. But, in my opinion, we need to take measures to limit the amount of trash that we send into space. We have already polluted our earth with devastating effects. Marine animals suffer, ecosystems suffer from our trash etc. In space, if we are done with the use of satellites or any other technology, we should just break it down or recycle it in a proper way so that we don't have to let it fly into space and remain orbiting around our earth. Additionally, we do not know of any extreme repercussions from space trash, so we should limit as much materials getting into space as possible.
May 13, 2019 at 7:37 PM
Anonymous said…
I didn’t realize that space trash was creating such a big issue. I think many people don’t pay attention to this because it is not affecting our daily lives. This pollution can be extremely dangerous because space trash can move at faster speeds and cause major issues if they burn up in our atmosphere. I think for right now, however, not much can be done about space trash because of how big and unexplored space is. We must make people aware of this issue and try to reduce our space trash, but this issue may not have much of a solution as of today.
May 13, 2019 at 8:51 PM
Anonymous said…
We humans don’t really think much about things we don’t see in our lives or on a day to day basis and I think the trash out in space is a prefect example. We tend to not care much about things we don’t see because we think it wouldn’t cause much harm on us or have any affect on us. I did hear about all the satellites wondering out in space but it didn’t really process in my mind on what or how it works in space. I think it would be really nice if we made this problem more aware and take action about it for future purposes.
May 13, 2019 at 9:13 PM
Anonymous said…
There are methods of dealing with space debris. One includes a moving space vehicle which pushes the debris towards the earth, where it’ll burn up in the atmosphere. The other is the use of lasers, which the momentum of the photon can slow debris enough so that it’ll slow down and fall into the atmosphere and burn up.

Of course, the greatest difficulty in cleaning up space debris are the political and economic issues. Who’s gonna clean up the space debris? Certainly NASA isn’t; they’re barely getting any funding from the government. Private companies like SpaceX won’t do it, as there’s no economic benefit. Due to the difficulties of rocket science, there are no non-profit organizations who can do it. One way to prevent more space debris is to instruct satyelites to automatically kill themselves in the atmosphere when they are used up. But will satellites from other countries agree?
May 13, 2019 at 10:53 PM
Anonymous said…
Space debris that we caused is an issue that is rarely ever mentioned, in fact I never really considered it an environmental issue until recently. It seems that since its not on the planet we inhabit “it doesn’t effect us”, but it sure does. I believe that biggest issue is that we don’t think about how much waste we are actually producing in space considering the amount of shuttles and satellites exploring the area. We should first focus on fixing the environmental issues that more directly threaten us and Earth first, and then move on to space clean up. By that time, we will hopefully have technologies developed to bring the debris back to Earth to a place where we can safely dispose of it.
May 14, 2019 at 3:03 PM
Anonymous said…
I have heard about this before and I think that it's crazy that over 20,000 particles can get into space and into orbit. Since we spend relatively little time in space, this demonstrates how messy and harmful humans are outside and inside our own environment. I think that it's an issue, but first we need to work on pollution on Earth. Scientists should look for ways to get the trash from space and help the Earth.
May 14, 2019 at 8:20 PM
Anonymous said…
As many of the previous people have said, space debris wasn't even on my radar as it doesn't affect any of us. That's an issue because although it isn't pertinent to our survival though at the moment. But as law of gravity says, what comes up(or in this case float around in space) will come down. Now since it's not an immediate problem, people might not fund safe removal of these space debris, the issue needs to be alleviated immediately because it will soon catch up to us.
May 18, 2019 at 8:42 AM
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