This is a model of everything orbiting earth being tracked
by the US Space Surveillance Network.
Orange dots are active satellites but everything else is junk or debris
made up of dead satellites, rocket bodies, stage separation fragments
as well as the odd thing that gets misplaced.
Wait did I say everything orbiting Earth?
I'm sorry, that's a fib because there are hundreds of millions of smaller debris
that can't be tracked and they're all hurtling around earth
at dizzying speeds, which means that when a window on the ISS
is hit by a tiny fleck of paint, this is what it looks like.
More and more our everyday lives depend on technology
that's orbiting the earth.
But 60 years of chucking stuff into space from the tiniest of satellites
to the most expensive man-made object has created a bit of a litter problem.
So how do we sort it out?
So space is a pretty big place but the areas we're talking about
are the orbits around Earth and we've put a lot of stuff up there.
Of all the man-made objects we track, 90% of it is junk from our entire history
of space travel.
Take this thing here.
This is Vanguard 1.
It was the fourth satellite in space, yet it's still doing circles around Earth
at a pacy 7 kilometers per second.
Now the only trouble is after contact with it was lost in 1964,
it's become a 1.5kg deadweight moving 10 times faster than an ak-47 bullet.
Oh that was smart.
Anything getting the way of that is gonna have a seriously bad day.
And until it's orbit decays and it gets pulled back into the atmosphere to burn up,
junk like this can keep going around Earth for decades or even centuries to come
Like Vanguard 1, which isn't expected to stop doing laps until 2198.
Yeah, it's like something out of a sci-fi movie.
People all across North Texas say today they saw smoking objects
falling from the sky and the Federal Aviation Administration has confirmed
this is debris from two satellites that crashed in orbit.
A devastating example of why these useless objects attract
occurred in 2009 when a derelict Russian satellite collided
with the active satellite Iridium sending shockwaves through the aerospace community.
Oh yes and the day was unforgettable.
Many phone calls.
The fragment cloud that was left behind is still causing trouble to us
today because every second collision warning that we are receiving
for our space craft is actually due to one of these fragments
and it has doubled the collision risk for all other spacecraft
that are operating in the vicinity.
So we really felt this this immediately.
This destructive power is made worse by the fact that such collisions
create more debris, which then increases the chances of another collision,
which then creates more debris and so on and so on.
This cascading effect is called Kessler syndrome
and it was illustrated to cataclysmic effect in a film, Gravity.
Since the beginning of the Space Age, the ESA estimate there been
over 500 debris events such as explosions, collisions or breakups
resulting in more fragments that put satellites at risk.
Satellites are part of our everyday lives we use them for everything –
in telecoms, weather forecasting, environmental monitoring, GPS,
live television ...
Ah, mama mia!
And yeah a fair bit of spying as well.
Everything in our day to day lives relies upon services that we get from space.
You know, so much so that the UK government has identified satellites
as being part of critical national infrastructure just like electricity supply,
water supply.
But now a second space race is creating a gold rush,
bringing new players in that all want to launch their own satellites.
SpaceX is really leading the way here.
It's been regularly blasting mega constellations of its Starlink satellites
into low-earth orbit ready to provide internet anywhere on Earth.
the company has permission to send 12,000 of these things into space.
It wants to increase this to 42,000 that's over four times the number of satellites
that have ever been launched.
And as we try to cram in more satellites into an already crowded orbit
the chances of new debris being created increases.
So what's being done?
Well one thing we can do is limit how much new debris is created
when planning a mission.
These guidelines from 1999 offers some simple measures to take
once a mission is over for preventing explosions,
of the safe spacecraft disposal.
However, we are not good enough in implementing a prevention measure
that had been already agreed on 20 years ago.
The success rate of 50% that we have today is a source of worry
because if this 50% also applies to the new space traffic,
it would be disastrous.
OK, so we need to be a bit better at leave no trace in space.
But what about all the junk that's already up there?
Well one idea is to take them out of orbit by launching spacecraft
that will act as litter pickers.
Some of the designs are kind of out there.
Clean up satellites that attach themselves to debris,
a space pac-man that gobbles up junk,
this Japanese electronic whip thing, drag sails, harpoons, nets
and of course lasers.
If you think these look expensive, you're not wrong.
The first mission to remove a single piece of debris will cost £107 million
and destroy both of debris and recovery spacecraft,
burning money literally right there.
The trickier problem though is political.
With a lack of transparency, it could be perceived as being an intervention
that somebody doesn't want.
You know going up to remove a bit of junk,
what's to stop you going up and interfering with
and removing somebody's active satellite or somehow you know interfering with it
to prevent its mission.
A UN treaty prevents countries from putting weapons into orbit
but because of their potential dual use, clean up satellites could sneak
past this restriction on sabre-rattling from space.
There's been no domain of human activity that's been absent of malicious behaviour.
None.
People behave badly especially in domains that are holistically unmonitored.
Space is one of those domains.
And right here is where there's a fundamental issue
with how everyone uses space, which is
There's no space traffic controller, as it were.
There's no protocol, there are no flight rules
and so everybody's kind of left to their own devices to figure out
how they operate in space.
And with a finite resource where people act independently,
that aggregate behaviour could actually lead to a tragedy of the Commons
because people could be behaving in ways that lead to more collisions
and more hazards and these sorts of things.
We are manually phoning and writing emails to each other to understand
to understand the plans of the other operators in preventing collisions.
A lot of work to be done.
After 60 years we've come to rely on the things we get from space
space in our day-to-day lives but it's come at a cost over 8,000 tons
of useless junk clogging up Earth's orbits.
As space becomes more commercialised, preventing a Kessler syndrome situation
will mean managing the traffic of tens of thousands of spacecraft,
both working and dead in heavily congested and heavily contested orbits.
People that are pretty much focused on the debris and the hazards
are being naive because that's not the largest problem, in my opinion.
That's a problem but to me that's the surface of this iceberg.
Thanks so much for watching this video. I hope you enjoyed it.
I'm gonna drop a bunch of links to reports and articles
that were mentioned in the film in the description below.
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