=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #148
—September 26, 1989—
News and resources for environmental justice.
——
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403
Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@igc.apc.org
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HABITS OF CIVILIZED PEOPLE PRODUCE
NEW HAZARD: ORBITING SPACE GARBAGE.
The so-called civilized nations have developed a way of life that
produces waste at phenomenal rates everywhere on earth. Even
outer space is now being trashed. Since “advanced” peoples first
began orbiting satellites around the earth in 1957, they have
managed to leave behind 7,300 pieces of trash large enough to be
tracked routinely by radar. Only a few hundred of these
constitute operating payloads. These large pieces of trash
include discarded launch rockets, defunct satellites, ejected
covers, and even occasional screwdrivers and wrenches. When you
count smaller pieces, there are somewhere between 30,000 and
70,000 objects orbiting the earth about the size of golf balls.
When you count smaller fragments, they may number in the
millions. In 1963, after a failed attempt in 1962, the Air Force
secretly put 1.2 billion metal needles into orbit, forming a belt
ten miles deep and ten miles wide circling the earth. Their
stated goal was to study worldwide radio communications. Since
that time, the needles have fallen back to earth and burned up
during reentry into the atmosphere.
Even small pieces of space trash are dangerous because they have
to be traveling fast to stay in orbit. A piece of space garbage
the size of a pea traveling at 11,000 to 20,000 miles an hour can
shatter a $100 million satellite. When such collisions occur,
they create many small fragments of new space junk, creating a
“self-propagating debris swarm,” increasing the chances of
further collisions.
Major collisions with orbiting solid waste have destroyed two and
perhaps three satellites. In 1985 a NASA (National Aeronautics
and Space Administration) spokesman said, “We might get to where
we a see a collision that breaks up an operating satellite once
every 10 years.” Both the space shuttle and the permanent
orbiting space station, planned for launch in the 1990s, will be
at risk of collision with space trash.
See “Space Fills Up With Junk,” ENVIRONMENT Vol. 27 (May, 1985),
pg. 24, and “Space Debris Poses Danger to Space Flights,” C&EN
[CHEMICAL & ENGINEERING NEWS] August 22, 1988, pg. 6.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
Descriptor terms: nasa; military; satellites; space;