Space Junk is a Danger to Us on Earth Is it getting dangerous for us because there is so much junk floating around the earth over our heads? I just heard the other day a satellite was coming down, it was an old abandoned one, and it is so large it won’t burn up. The problem is there is no way to guide it down and when it does crash it could be anywhere. Maybe we should all be wearing those metal hats they use on construction sites. Anyway, as more satellites become junk, and join the other junk floating around is the danger increasing we will get more uncontrolled crashes? The small stuff will burn up so we don’t really have to worry about being hit by a screw traveling thousands of miles an hour, but the same is not true for part of a rocket, some of the old satellites or even a space station. Just recently something fell out of the sky and crashed into a house in Romania. It scared the heck out of the people living there and you can understand why. One minute they are sitting comfortably watching television and the next minute there is a very loud bank and they lost a chunk off a part of their home. Some thought it was part of an aircraft, but many more believe it is space junk. When it was tested it was said it didn’t identify as a part of an airplane. The object took a nice piece out of the balcony of the structure. In 2018 an astrophysicist said there are quite a few things in low earth orbit which we should keep an eye on. One of the things he said was of particular interest, an Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. It was used to send up a remote sensing satellite. The object weighed about a ton. Luckily it didn’t do any damage. The higher up something falls from space the faster it comes down. The weight is also a factor. When things are launched into space, no country gives much thought what will happen when they fall back to earth. What has many people fooled is the fact objects falling from space are not as rare an event as one would think. In 2016 about two hundred objects fell back to earth. In 2014 there were six hundred. One reason it seems rarer than it actually is, is the fact these things fall all over the earth and are not covered by the news unless there is some tragedy. Objects orbiting the earth are moving so fast a bullet would seem slow in comparison. To stay in orbit an object has to be traveling at 17,000 miles per hour. In 2008 the US Navy decided to test its capability to shoot down a satellite. They had an old spy satellite in orbit which made a perfect target. The satellite was USA-193. They hit it and blew it apart. This caused pieces to fall over the northwestern part of the United States and Canada. The debris had some pieces which were as large as a football. Can you imagine an object the size of a football falling from orbit as it was traveling at 17,000 miles per hour? It could do quite a bit of damage. One woman was outside when she got hit in the head with something. Lucky for her it was a piece of woven material which was charred. It was determined later that the material had come from a Delta 2 booster rocket. There had been other debris from the rocket which would have killed the woman if she had been hit. One piece was a steel propellant tank and another was a titanium pressure sphere. The material that hit her did no damage but could you imagine if it had been some sort of metal? There has to be some way we become protected from this type of thing. Perhaps before satellites are launched, they must contain a self-destruct system which will send the debris into space somehow. Not everything which comes back to earth only has the ability to crush us in some way, there are also objects which contain deadly radioactive parts. Years ago, a Soviet satellite came crashing back to earth and landed in the Canadian woods. The object contained a small nuclear reactor and presented the danger of nuclear contamination. Lucky for Canada the reactor was still sealed and we were told no radiation had leaked out. The shielding on the reactor must have been incredibly strong to withstand this impact. In the year 2000 NASA decided they wanted to take an observatory out of orbit. It had been deactivated. It was named the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. They slowed it down so it would fall back to earth. It was said to be a controlled deorbit and NASA was aiming for an area without any people. They had decided to send the observatory in the ocean. Watch out fishing boats. It crashed into the Pacific without causing damage to anyone. The world got lucky when the huge space station Mir crashed back to earth. The Mir weighed 286,600 pounds and was the heaviest object to crash back to earth. In 2001 it began its descent. It was aimed at the Pacific Ocean near Fiji. The bulk of the station burned up on reentry, but people on the beach in Nadi, Fiji could see flaming debris and some of the debris was large enough to cause sonic booms. It is certainly lucky this was able to be steered to a rather remote area successfully. Skylab didn’t do as good as Mir on reentry. It weighed 77 tons and was only in orbit for about six years. I say it didn’t do as good because even though it was aimed at the Indian Ocean, pieces fell over Western Australia, but this area is not heavily populated. One can’t help but think there is a possibility today of some of us getting hit with space debris. Yes, it is a small chance and may be as small as winning the lottery, but the chance does exist. If we don’t take precautions and get the nations of the world to become treaty partners in treaties which have rules about how to get rid of objects in space after they become junk, things are going to get a lot more dangerous for us. Satellites are a necessity so we will probably always be putting up one type or another so we have to address this. The same is true for pieces of expended rockets which are used to launch these objects and devices such as space telescopes and other devices. We should do this now before things get much worse.
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