In the past 60 years, earthlings have shot more than 56,000 objects into space, according to the European Space Agency (ESA), with more than half still in orbit but only about 4,000 still working.
That means more than 50,000 satellites, rockets, and other remnants have died or broken apart, creating a field of swirling debris – an estimated hundreds of millions of loose nuts and bolts, paint chips, rocket engines, lens covers, thermal blankets, and so on – that threatens to collide with the satellites we depend on to communicate, drive somewhere we’ve never been, and other routine tasks.
The danger of collisions and satellite failures is about to rise exponentially with the ongoing launch of so-called satellite “mega-constellations.”
Amazon’s Project Kuiper has slated as many as 3,200 satellites to offer broadband access to the world’s poor. Starlink, an effort of Tesla offspring SpaceX, has 1,200 orbiters aloft, having launched 350 already this year. A company called OneWeb is planning a phase-one fleet of 650 to surround the planet with web access.
With neither governments nor private launch companies stepping in to pick up after themselves, a Japanese start-up called Astroscale is testing a garbage collection service in space.
Launched March 22 aboard a Russian rocket – which was laden with dozens of other satellites – Astroscale’s “End-of-Life Demonstration” is a device that the company says will gobble trash out of the debris field, then fall from orbit, burning up itself and its accumulated debris as it re-enters the atmosphere.
TRENDPOST: Astroscale is a nice idea, but burning up a garbage truck once it’s full is hardly practical. Also, space junk comes in different sizes, from bits smaller than a fingernail to ESA’s eight-ton Envisat, a defunct space observatory the size of a double-decker bus. Different means will be needed to collect different kinds of trash.
When governments and private launch companies realize that the orbiting garbage patch threatens their operations – a realization most likely to dawn after a major crash that cancels key services on Earth – those entities will begin to create a market for researchers and entrepreneurs in a fledging waste collection industry in outer space.
