Spaced Out

After the euphoria & positivity following yesterday's excellent Ocean Race Summit, I woke up to read the UK Space Agency announcement of a ￡1 million fund to tackle spacecraft safety against space debris.

Space debris is perhaps a more palatable term for space junk, which is any piece of machinery or debris left by humans in space. This ranges from dead or failed satellites or bits of paint that have fallen off a rocket.

The film released by the UK Space Agency highlights 900,000 pieces of space junk over 1cm orbiting the Earth.

Within this statistic there are about 2,000 active satellites orbiting Earth at the moment and 3,000 dead ones littering space. There is about 34,000 pieces of space junk bigger than 10 centimetres.

Our moon has 3 moon buggies on its surface left by Apollo 15, 16 & 17. Since 1959, seven countries or member states have left spacecraft or probes on the moon - #USSR, #USA, #Japan, #Europe, #India, #China & most recently in 2019 #Israel.

 The first satellite launched into space was only 63 years ago.

 Yesterday, should have been an historic moment for SpaceX & NASA, but ironically the launch was prevented by Mother Nature - they will try again on Saturday.

If successful, this will lead to the commercialisation of space exploration & space travel. In addition to Space X, companies such as Boeing will enter this lucrative market, as NASA and other space organisations start to outsource.

The United Nations has a policy that requires all companies to remove their satellites from orbit within 25 years after the end of their mission. But this is never enforced, as many satellites fail. Some companies have been established to tackle the problem of recovering space junk, with very limited success.

Surely there must be greater accountability in preventing space junk & collecting space debris; with stronger international legislation which can be better enforced.

At present we have 17 Sustainable Development Goals; notably SDG14 - Life Below Water & SDG15 - Life On Land. It seems to me that now might be a really good time to apply SDG18 - Life Below Space

The accumulation of space junk, may trap us on Earth. This scenario is known as the Kessler Syndrome put forward by NASA scientist Donald Kessler in 1978. He said that if there was too much space junk, we could get to a point where the Earth's orbit became unusable. But who knows what other damage we might be doing.

However, one thing is certain; even the beautiful, yet terrifying power of Mother Nature is a mere fly in the ointment for Father Cosmos.