TheBlueprint
Designing A Line Of Thinking
Humanity traps itself on Earth
-Anirban Ghosh
Elon Musk and his efforts to put the first humans on Mars, while commendable might not remain a possibility in the near future. With humans sending spaceships and satellites in much greater number than ever before, a very interesting phenomenon is beginning to take shape. Like we do back here on earth, human’s have begun polluting the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) with debris from previous endeavors to explore the vast expanse of space.
With each space shuttle weighing around 2 million kilograms, they house large building sized fuel containers and engines the size of entire rooms. The craft however only needs to send a fridge sized payload into LEO, the rest of the mass is ejected in stages and is left as debris which orbits the earth much like our moon and the ISS. The issue begins to emerge when we analyze just how these debris orbits the Earth.
All of the individual nuts and bolts of these gigantic rockets orbit the earth at the speeds of 10 km/s. For context, your typical 9 mm bullet travels through air at the speed of 380 m/s, roughly 4% the speed of these in-orbit objects. These pieces of debris are therefore extremely hazardous to all space dwellers, or more importantly humans who would like to get themselves into space. Every time humans send something in space, they are technically making their next mission to space a little more dangerous.
There would soon come a point that we would create a birdcage that would surround the planet, thereby destroying our dreams of intergalactic travel for millennia to come.
While this may dishearten some of the science and space enthusiasts, most of us might not be too concerned since it doesn’t directly affect us. Chances are that we like our ancestors are going to meet our demise on Earth itself. It may be true that space travel restrictions would probably not affect us too drastically, there is yet another problem with having debris zoom around in space.
A keen minded NASA scientist known as Donald Kessler realized that other things beside from space debris also float in LEO and that if these hazardous pieces of debris were to get into contact with other objects like the almost 2000 satellites we have in LEO or even the ISS, the damage would be catastrophic. We would witness a disaster unbeknown to humans. With services like the Internet, Television and GPS being unable to function, we would see a communication disaster where no one would be able to contact their relatives, colleagues or employees. It would cause a breakdown of industries like telecommunications and cause state heads to be unable to issue guidelines to citizens. Doctors would not be able to order medical supplies and the ensuing chaos would probably lead to power shortages. The aviation industry wouldn’t be able to contact pilots, submarine and coastal communications would be hampered causing a severe loss of life. We would essentially be restricted to horses as our means of communication.
More shocking is the fact that it would only take a single collision to cause this effect. This is because, when one satellite or other orbiting object is hit, it would cause it to break into millions of small pieces of debris which would in turn break other objects, so on creating a sort of cascading effect. This phenomenon is known as the Kessler Syndrome named after Donald Kessler, the scientist mentioned above.
What can we do in order to prevent such a catastrophe from occurring? NASA keeps a close tab on this debris in order to prevent their spaceships from being harmed by them. This is good news for us as this means that we wouldn’t be getting more waste to worry about. NASA also has it’s Orbital Space Plane, a plane that can be reused many times to deliver resources to the ISS, significantly reducing the number of rockets that need to be launch, consequently also reducing the amount of space waste that we create.
This however wouldn’t reduce the amount of waste we have already created. To deal with that, scientists have come up with some rather peculiar ideas. One of which is the space tether that is for all purposes. It is a space net which would catch large, high velocity objects in LEO and then return to earth for processing when it has collected it’s assigned payload.
Another idea is one intended to deal with small clouds of high velocity shrapnel-like objects which wouldn’t be able to be caught by nets. The idea is to use high powered electromagnets which would follow the debris till it is able to slow it down enough to be caught. After which it will retract the magnet and carry the waste down back down to Earth.
While these ideas might sound like science fiction, the threat of the Kessler Syndrome is very real and we need to put these ideas into practice to protect modern civilization as we know it. Until that happens, we may one day soon bear the ill effects of the waste that we have created.