- [Moriba] I look at all these dots
and I see a huge problem.
- [Loren] The space around Earth is getting pretty crowded.
There are nearly 3,000 active satellites
circling above our heads in Earth orbit.
And we're tracking more than 20,000
pieces of debris at all times.
Moriba Jah is a scientist on a mission
to track all the things flying above our heads.
He built a massive visualizer to show what could happen
as crucial orbits turn into a massive pile-up.
- [Moriba] There's nothing you can do.
Anything that is red, your strategy is hope.
(dynamic music)
Welcome to the SOSR, the Space Object Situation Room.
- [Loren] Projected on the screen is AstriaGraph.
It's a visualizer built by Moriba.
And it shows the locations of all the things
we're currently tracking in space.
From active satellites to unknown material.
It really does make it look like there's a lot of crap,
for lack of a better term, around Earth.
So walk me through what we're seeing here.
- [Moriba] So what you're seeing here
is opinions about these, about 26,000 objects,
ranging in size from the cell phone
all the way to the space station, in different orbits.
- [Loren] Satellites operate in various orbits.
Basically highways that zoom around Earth.
Different types of satellites orbit on different highways.
- [Moriba] The one that you can very much see
is this geostationary highway.
Takes about 24 hours for a satellite
to go around its orbit once there.
So the geostationary highway
is where we put communication satellites.
So that means that if you want Direct TV
you don't have to touch your dish,
you just point it at a specific place in the sky
and you're gonna acquire the signal.
You can also see some things in low Earth orbit.
One of 'em is these strings of pearls
that you see right here.
And the other one, like right here,
these are Starlink satellites that SpaceX
has launched for global internet.
Pretty much anything in yellow is stuff that's working.
Stuff that's cyan are things that used to work but died.
And so they're still up there
moving around at very high speeds.
- [Loren] To get the positions of all these satellites
AstriaGraph draws on tracking information
from numerous sources.
That leads to multiple different opinions
about where the satellite actually is.
Estimates can differ by a couple football fields.
- [Moriba] We hear about these collision warnings
all the time, we see it in the news.
Uh, watch out over Pittsburgh, these things are gonna cross.
So the question is, it's gonna collide
based on whose opinion?
Like this is one object with four different opinions.
If I say, move out of the way,
move out of the way of which one?
One, two, three, or four?
- [Loren] With the amount of stuff increasing in space,
and a lack of consensus on where everything is,
the potential for collisions has gone up.
- [Moriba] This is an application that pulls
information from AstriaGraph to basically say,
out of about 20,000 objects, choose any two of these,
and tell me, will these things come within
six miles of each other within the next 20 minutes?
And if the answer is yes, show me.
The thing is, if you're noticing any sort of traffic here
it's already too late to do anything.
- [Loren] Oh wow.
So if there's a collision coming up and I see it here
it might have already happened.
- [Moriba] It's too late.
- [Loren] Let's talk about
the consequences of an actual collision
- [Moriba] Whenever things collide,
or whenever things explode,
they go from two things to thousands of things.
Unfortunately, all of these objects,
all of these dots that you see there
came from one what I call super spreader event,
which is a rocket body that exploded
less than two years ago.
And so one event generated all this junk,
which unfortunately will be crisscrossing
this geostationary highway.
- [Loren] Do you have a sense of how much
these conjunction warnings have increased
over the last few years?
- [Moriba] Yeah, so I will say that,
just in my own experience,
I have seen a doubling of these conjunctions
just due to the fact that we have things like
the Starlinks on orbit right now.
- [Loren] Starlink is SpaceX's ambitious project
to place nearly 12,000 internet satellites
into low to medium Earth orbit.
The company has been launching about
60 satellites every month or so.
And other companies, like OneWeb and Amazon,
have their own plans for huge satellite constellations.
- [Moriba] There's about 3,000 things that are working.
Elon's Starlinks alone are about 800 of those.
- [Loren] So that increased the amount of active satellites
by such a high percentage.
- [Moriba] Yeah, and it's just gonna continue.
- [Loren] An idea that often comes up
when talking about space junk is the Kessler syndrome.
The idea that at some point there'll be too much stuff
in space, triggering a runaway cascade of collisions.
Orbits would become permanently unusable.
Moriba doesn't see that future.
He thinks that if collisions get out of hand
we could hit pause on new launches
and eventually new collisions would taper off.
- [Moriba] So the thing is if we didn't launch things
every few weeks and we just left Mother Nature alone
we would reach an equilibrium state.
- [Loren] But he believes that
the orbits up there still have their limits.
What is the biggest danger when it comes to
the crowding in space?
- [Moriba] So the biggest danger is that,
just like with any ecosystem,
there is a finite capacity,
carrying capacity, of the ecosystem.
The biggest danger is that we exceed
the carrying capacity of any given orbital highway.
And then we can't use it anymore.
- [Loren] For now, there are no rules in place
to stop a country from launching more, and more, and more.
Lots of researchers and companies have proposed
ways of cleaning up Earth orbit using tools,
like harpoons, magnets, nets, and more.
But Moriba thinks that a long-term solution
has to include limits.
- It would be interesting if we could come up with
this carrying capacity and have some entity,
maybe the United Nations, saying, hey,
you can lease this much capacity.
At the end you have to dispose of your satellites
to give that capacity back to the environment.
- But to really have a harmonious relationship
with space, countries and companies may need to
start thinking in terms of conservation.
Orbit may not be a living ecosystem,
but it's still fragile.
The way you talk about space really makes it feel like
the way we talk about public lands, public parks.
What kind of lessons could we take from
the environmentalist movement or indigenous cultures
to better serve our space environment?
- So, very interestingly, Loren, there are pockets
of indigenous people around the globe
that over tens of thousands of years,
they've come up with principles for how to live sustainably
because their lives depended on it.
The Aborigines, the Inuit.
And some of the principles are like this, right?
Like one of 'em is, understand the relationships
between things in an environment
before you start making decisions and acting.
If we're pumping all these satellites into Earth orbit
very frequently, we don't give the environment
enough time to give us feedback
on the unintended consequences of our actions.
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