The German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ, German only) today published an article on space junk. The shocking image is an eye opener. Humankind continues to repeat the mistake of strewing waste into common spaces without a thought to the consequences, leaving costs we don’t want to pay today for the future generations. The FAS article spurred our curiosity, leading us to find even more spectacular video and potential solutions to the problem (overleaf).
The ESA Space Debris Accumulation video depicts the tragic build up of space debris from 1957 through 2000. According to ESA’s resident space debris expert, Walter Flury, the 10,000 pieces of space litter catalogued at the end of 2003 break into the following categories:
* 41% — miscellaneous fragments
* 22% — old spacecraft
* 13% — mission related objects
* 7% — operational spacecraft
* 7% — rocket bodies
Doing the math, that is 93% pure junk and only 7% useful satellites circling the earth. More disturbing, 50,000 uncatalogued objects larger than 1 cm (the largest size which modern shielding can likely deflect) are estimated to be spinning through space at hypervelocities.
The windows on the Space Shuttle have been replaced 80 times due to impacts with objects of less than 1 mm.
– from treehuggers