In 1958, as the space race was ramping up, Americans sent the Vanguard 1 satellite up into space in response to Russia’s Sputnik 1 the previous year. Today, Vanguard 1 is still floating around up in the Earth’s medium orbit, a couple thousand miles out. It’s known to be the first piece of “space junk,” and set the tone for the fate of space-bound apparatuses to come.
We are increasingly aware of how the materials used on Earth take an environmental toll on our surroundings, but there’s also a pollution crisis lightyears away in space. As we send more and more items into orbit, more space junk is accumulating from disused objects, prompting scientists to track it and experiment with methods of disposal. They recommend that, like on Earth, the best course is to create a circular economy: a closed-loop system whereby space equipment can be reused and recycled.
Once out of service, old rockets and satellites have historically been disposed of in the ocean, like in the South Pacific’s “Spacecraft Cemetery”; others are burned up in the atmosphere, or allowed to fall out of Earth’s orbit. But most simply continue to circulate around the Earth in apparent perpetuity. There are currently 55,000 pieces of space junk that we know of; the total could be more like 170 million.
Space junk can be whole items of machinery, or tiny parts that fly off as they collide with other objects or explode in the atmosphere, from flecks of paint to nuts and bolts. They can be dangerous as they accumulate. The Kessler Syndrome describes the phenomenon that when debris reaches a critical mass, it will keep increasing, because it will constantly collide with other junk and generate more debris. That’s already happening.
Put simply, it’s pollution, says Moriba Jah, an aerospace engineer and National Geographic Explorer, who describes himself as a space environmentalist. From his home in Maui, he has tracked manmade space objects via telescope since the 2000s. In 2006, he was tracking about 26,000 objects, and only 1,200 were in active use. “Everything else was just garbage,” he says. He tends to think of pollution resulting from space exploration as similar to tourists coming to his home state of Hawaii for a short time, dumping plastics on the beach, and then leaving.
Jah says exploration of new territory has often been careless toward the new environment, first with land and sea colonization, and now in space, as exploration ramps up. “It doesn’t have to be to the detriment of the environment as has historically occurred,” he says.
As we send more and more objects into space today—between 1,200 and 1,500 a year now, versus only tens of them 20 years ago—junk is a much more serious issue. The U.S. government is commissioning multiple satellite constellations, or large networks of satellites to be installed in space. It has granted permission to Elon Musk’s SpaceX to place 12,000 satellites in the lower atmosphere over the next decade, possibly to be extended to 42,000.
Economic concern might be what moves companies and governments to invest in solutions to space junk. When they send these plush new items into space, they risk damage during use from the existing trash. “Whatever you send up in space is damned expensive to make and send up there,” says Ian Williams, professor of applied environmental science at the University of Southampton in the UK. Orbiting junk also has the potential to damage communications satellites, which we heavily rely on for many internet services.
Discarding or abandoning expensive equipment also seems absurd, given how long the materials last and how relatively quickly they’re used. “There’s a colossal amount of metals and fabulous materials floating out there,” Williams says. “You’re destroying a huge amount of value. What’s the point if we can get it back?”
Williams is the lead author of the first study to show that a circular economy in space is financially viable. They calculated that the reuse and recycling of space junk could have a net value of between $570 billion and $1.2 trillion.
SpaceX has shown that it’s feasible to send up multiple-use apparatuses, such as its Falcon rockets that have been used multiple times. But for a truly circular economy, the rest of the materials that aren’t yet multiuse would need to be recycled.
Williams suggests two clear options to close the loop. Given that most satellites aren’t very big, he says there could be recycling plants on space stations, with technicians to strip the equipment and reuse and recycle the components. Or, they could be recovered and brought back down to Earth, and reused and recycled for other applications on land. (Either way, the study claims a “genuinely sustainable approach” would also be a source of new green jobs, suggesting more than 15,000 for the UK Space Agency alone.)
Williams says various companies have already approached him to discuss tech solutions, from small startups with conceptual ideas, to larger companies with prototypes. But due to the costs, it will require investment from the world’s biggest space agencies and governmental bodies. “The reality is that only a small number of countries and companies have got the financial clout to do this,” Williams says, including NASA, and the European and UK Space Agencies. Governments are already thinking about it. Senator John Hickenlooper introduced a bill with bipartisan support in February to invest in clearing the debris. The European Space Agency already has a goal to reach net-zero debris by 2030.
For Jah, the first step is tracking the objects. His company, Privateer (whose cofounders also include Steve Wozniak), aims to create an open source of data to help reach a circular economy in space. This year, Privateer launched an app, Wayfinder, that monitors all the known pieces of junk, including their networks and trajectories, and opens the data to the general public, to help ordinary people start thinking about solutions. He views it as a “Waze” for space, which could also encourage “ridesharing” satellites, like a car share service, to lower the need for excess satellites in space.
Williams likes the idea as a way to increase awareness and spur innovation. “Once people start with this, it moves really fast,” he says. “It’s a bit like AI. It goes from nowhere in people’s minds, [to] on everybody’s lips in six months.”
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