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- If there is anything
we can all agree upon it is this:
Humans are extremely efficient at
polluting. No place however challenging
is below our competence. Even
if it is 300 miles overhead. We won't be
deterred even 20,000 miles
overhead or even further " like, on Mars.
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- AERO - This 500-pound stainless
steel tank, re-entered
after nine months in orbit, landing 50 yards
from a Texas farmer's home
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- Since 1957, when the first artificial satellite was
launched,
well over 100,000 waste objects have been put into orbit
around our fair
planet. These break up and create more waste. As a
result, only six percent
of all objects orbiting Earth are good faith
operational spacecrafts.
The remainder is all junk. Junk created when
screws and bolts are ejected
from booster rockets, when upper stages
are discarded, casings removed
and satellites decommissioned.
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- According to NASA,
which is taking the refuse problem
quite seriously, there are
currently about 70,000 objects of about an
inch in diameter orbiting
between 500 and 600 miles up. That's the good
news. The bad news is,
most are frozen bits of nuclear reactor coolant
from Russian
satellites.
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- The Earth's atmosphere is like a Chernobyl cocktail with
ingredients speeding around at thousands of miles per hour. To an
astronaut
gracefully floating in a space station or transport vehicle,
collision
with a small aluminum piece 1/16th of an inch in diameter is
equivalent
to getting hit by a .22 caliber bullet from a rifle.
Collision with a
half inch aluminum ball would be like catching a
400-lb safe at 60 mph.
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- There is an inexhaustible list of sources for space
debris,
which is usually classified according to size and placed into
three classes
based on diameter. Below 100 microns in diameter (1/32 of
an inch), natural
meteors are more common than manmade waste. Still, a
fleck of white paint
200 microns in diameter left a quarter inch wide
crater on a space shuttle
windshield when they collided at 10,000
mph.
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- Fortunately, most objects re-enter the atmosphere and
burn up
within 25 years of launch. Unfortunately, some, such as the case
of a
500-lb fuel tank that missed a house by 50 yards in Georgetown, Texas,
do not. Moreover, satellites in high orbits cannot be forced to re-enter
the atmosphere within a 25-year period.
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- For this reason, Europeans are
pushing for a space cemetery,
a sort of graveyard for decommissioned
satellites. NASA every so often
announces plans to send a magnetic
pooper-scooper into orbit and retrieve
thousands of pieces of steel
and aluminum debris. Both suggestions leave
non-magnetic debris
floating around the Earth.
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- Nevertheless, telecommunications have come to rely so
heavily on satellites that over a thousand launches are predicted in the
next six to seven years. But the collision of a typical 1,200 lb telecom
satellite with a 4 inch wide piece of junk would produce a cloud of
debris
containing up to a million fragments.
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- So, rather than a desire to
keep our planet pristine,
necessity is pushing space agencies and
commercial launchers into self-regulation
if not government
regulation. These would include eco-sensitive deployment
procedures
such as tethering loose objects, designing satellites to minimize
the
risk of propellant explosion, debris removal or a mechanism to propel
satellites into the Earth's atmosphere for burn up (or controlled
re-entry)
or to the space cemetery for eternal peace, well, that is
until drag forces
ultimately bring the cemetery tumbling down.
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- Possibly the greatest
argument against UFOs is that they
would have collided with orbiting
human garbage. Indeed, recently the space
shuttle had to make several
evasive maneuvers to avoid collisions, and
a French satellite was
incapacitated. All the same, every cloud (of debris)
has its silver
lining. In 1998, an intercontinental ballistic missile "
a
Minuteman " suddenly disappeared from radar. According to a U.S.
Air Force official, the missile was lost after colliding with space debris
that lay in the missile's path. Wouldn't it be ironic, a nuclear holocaust
thwarted by litter?
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