Topic > Space Debris - 1879

Space. The final frontier. A place of mysteries that must be explored. New, immaculate and intact. But how intact is it? How many satellites and probes have we sent into space? How many did we just leave there? The first man-made object in space was in fact not the well-known Sputnik 1, but the body of the rocket that brought Sputnik into orbit. Space debris has been around since the beginning of space exploration. There are currently approximately 22,000 man-made objects orbiting the earth. Only 2,500 of these objects are satellites, functioning or dead (“Orbital Debris,” 2012). The rest is just debris. Space junk, orbiting the earth at thousands of miles an hour. And we're putting it out faster than it drops. These thousands of debris hurtling around the earth at speeds of approximately 17,500 miles per hour pose an obvious problem from a risk and hazard approach. Even a paint chip traveling that fast can cause damage. However, this also poses a problem from an ecocentric point of view. We are already polluting space and most of our population is still stranded on the ground. We have no idea what kind of environmental damage this could cause. This problem is being addressed, but not with sufficient urgency. A Brief History of Space Debris Sputnik was launched in 1957, and since then a barrage of man-made objects has left the confines of Earth to explore the unknown. A few years passed before people started wondering about the debris out there. Already in 1978, a theory was introduced about the exponential increase of space debris due to collisions and the breakup of the objects involved in the collisions. This is known as Kessler syndrome and has been shown to be very accurate (Bonnel, C., Ruault, J., Desjean, M., 2013). However, it wasn't until 1979 that NASA began formally investigating the issue of orbital debris. They