Is space mostly empty or full of junk?
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Hey Daniel, do you think the planet Earth is getting too crowded?
Well, you know, we live in southern California, so we do experience a good amount of traffic, even though I get to wear sandals all year long.
Well, does it make you want to move out of Southern California?
Well, you know, I'd be hesitant to give up the sandals, but I'd love to live in outer space.
Oh yeah. Do you think communing would be easier in space?
Well, it can't be much worse than it is down here in southern California.
Well, I think you better move up there soon, because space might be getting more crowded than you think.
Are you talking about Elon Musk's Tesla that he launched out there.
There's going to be a traffic jem off Tesla's up there pretty soon. Hi, am Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD Comics.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle of physicist. But I love all things space, even if they don't have aliens in them.
And so welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we take a mental tour of the universe, zipping from neutron stars to black holes, to alien planets, and even talk about tiny things here on Earth like little particles, electrons and quantum tunneling. And the key is to share with you the wonders, the mystery, the majesty of this universe in a way that's explainable and hopefully makes you laugh and maybe cringe once or twice at our bad jokes only but only once or twice two cringes per episode, and then you're cut off.
Yeah, and then that's right. Then you have to keep listening in silence. But yeah, it's about all the amazing things we can see from this planet Earth that we're sitting on in traffic, right we're sort of in the traffic of the Solar System, right behind Mars and Venus. Nice to the crowded asteroid belt.
Yeah, we're in an unusually dense part of the universe. You know, if you took like an average cubic kilometer of the universe, it would be pretty empty. Most likely, you just get like a chunk of space in between galaxies. Even inside the galaxies, most of them don't have planets in them. So our neighborhood of the universe is pretty dense. We have a star, we've got a bunch of planets. There's a lot of rocks out there.
Yeah, I hate it when the asteroids hunk behind me. It's so annoying.
Well, look, been doing it for billions of years. So they hate when like newbies come in and mess up their commute.
You know, that's right. It's people who don't signal. Has it Earth signaled lately?
Which way it's turning, I don't know, But we keep launching up stuff into space out there, messing up everybody else's commute.
So, yeah, we imagine there are a lot of you out there listening to this podcast, maybe sitting in your cars in traffic, and you're probably wondering where all these people came from. Are there too many people on Earth? And is it too crowded? Out here.
Yeah, maybe you feel like launching all those people out into space that you have the four h five to yourself.
Yeah, and so we were thinking, are there alternatives? Could you live out in space to get away from it all?
But you might be surprised to discover that space actually has a bunch of stuff in it as well. It's not a pristine territory. It's the final frontier, but it's also filled with traffic.
It's getting crowded out there, right.
That's right. You probably heard about Elon Musk's plans to launch thousands and thousands of new satellites to improve your download speeds.
Yeah, just the stuff that's going to be launched. But there are a bunch of stuff out there already floating out there right in space.
Yeah, So we thought we'd dive into this topic between the Earth's surface and the rest of the universe and talk about how much stuff is there out there.
So to the end the program, we'll be tackling the question is space crowded? How much stuff is up there? How much room is there? And do you need to get a fast carpoo late pass just to get out to Mars these days?
Well, traffic in space at least would be more complicated because you got another dimension to move in, right, I mean, I don't know how they plan to organize it, but you can always go over the car in front of you.
That's like a double nightmare for me. It's like multi dimensional traffic.
It sounds like there's a zillion more ways to get into an accident.
I feel like, at least here on Earth, if I'm stuck in traffic, I can still fantasize about flying upwards or digging down and getting away from it all. But if you're in space and it's space jam, traffic jam, you got nowhere to go.
I think you owe Michael Jordan ten cents for mentioning.
I know, I know that. Yeah, and bugs buddy.
Yeah. But you may have heard the news that Elon Musk is planning to launch a bunch of satellites. They recently deployed one hundred and twenty two satellites into low Earth orbit to test their Internet from space idea and his plans are to launch a bunch more. Not one hundred more, not two hundred more, not a thousand more, but something like ten thousand in the near future, stretching up to maybe forty thousand in the far.
Future, and it's all part of his plan to create the space turnet. Is that what he's calling it.
That isn't but he should have. That is the best possible dam you.
Know, we got space Force, why not space Internet.
Yeah, and you're probably thinking, hey, look, space is big, right, I mean, the universe is vast. Daniel was just saying how space is mostly empty? How could space ever get crowded? And you're right, there is a lot of space up there. You do a quick calculation up to high Earth orbit and there's like two hundred trillion cubic kilometers of space just surrounding our planet. And currently humans have launched about two thousand operational satellites, So that doesn't seem like much. I mean, do the math. You get about ninety billion cubic kilometers per operational satellite. That seems like a lot, right, And it.
Seems that's like the ratio between space and currently how many satellites there are out there.
Yeah, we got two thousand satellites that are running that are doing something that are helping us, that are like, you know, telling you where your phone are, or spying on North Korea or whatever. You take all the amount of space out there in sort of high Earth orbit, and you get ninety billion cubic kilometers per satellite. So it seems like plenty of room.
It seems like plenty of room. But I think the problem is that if you run into one of these things in space, it's pretty bad news.
Yeah, this is very high speed traffic. So we thought it'd be fun to talk about whether there really is room out there. How dangerous is it to launch a satellite? And how long do you have to wait after you put on your left turn signal before you know it's clear to pull your tesla into lower th orbits?
Yeah, because you definitely don't want to have a bumper to bumper collision here with a satellite going hundreds or thousands of kilo hunters per hour.
Right, No, you certainly don't. I'm pretty sure your insurance doesn't cover it. Definitely not the one you got on your rental car.
So they're about two thousand satellites right now operating out in space. But it's not just satellites out there, right, there's also space junk.
Yeah, So I was wondering if people were aware of this problem. Do people know that space has more than just operational satellites on it. Do people think space is totally empty and there's lots of room out there for frontiers people to go out and claim their chunk, or do people think that space is mostly crowded and already filled with Elon Musk's garbage?
What are you going to say, Elon monks junk?
I should have said that that was much better, musk un. Maybe he's planning a business where he takes your junk and dumps it in space.
Oh, there you go, one nine hundred, got space.
One nine hundred musk junk.
Must what what must I do with my gun?
And if he didn't plan that, he's probably a listener to this podcast because it's awesome and now he's planning it. So Elon we get one percent stakes.
So, as usual, Daniel went out there into the street and ask random strangers if they thought that space was getting to crowded.
Here's what people had to say. But before you hear their answers, think to yourself, do you think space is overcrowded or is there a lot of room for more stuff?
I would say probably filled with satellites and crowded.
Yeah, so yeah, it's like dangerous to be up there.
I don't know if it's totally crowded, but it's probably getting there, I would imagine.
I would say it was empty, mostly empty, Yeah, so like roody for lots more stuff.
Yeah, I think it's definitely still mostly empty.
See, there's lots of room for more satellites.
Well, I don't think we should put a lot more satellites, but I bet there's more room of food needed to Oh.
I think there's.
Already a lot of satellites, and I think more will have a big impact on the light quality that astronomers can collect data.
From mostly empty, mostly empty.
Wise that because of the size of space and how you can put the satellites in different layers in different orbits.
Do you agree, Yes, I'm sure there's a lot of junk up there. Oh, it's mostly empty, and I think it's stilled at satellites.
It feels like that's sort of relative, but it's probably as room for more. I guess that there's a lot of space junk out there, but there's so much. I know there's a lot of space up there, so I don't think it's too crowded. I know there are collisions, but I don't think they happen that often, but I'd say in the near future that probably could be a problem.
It's a why do you think? It's mostly feel that just because.
The amount of communication that we have and data exchange, there's got to be satellites, old satellites, disposed satellites.
So is there like a dander of satellites bumping into each other? And so I'm sure, but I don't know what they'll do anything.
But I don't know if they're made of you know, but I've heard rumors of space trash too, you know.
All right, So people don't seem too concerned about the crowd in this space.
No, but I'm not sure how many of these folks actually had like plans to launch anything. So it's a bit of an abstract question for them, you know.
Oh, I see, I see. Do you think that maybe they're trying not to be alarmists.
Or maybe they're thinking, Man, I got too many things to worry about here, I got finals coming up, I got rent to pay. Who cares about space junk?
Mmm?
You didn't get a lot of concern here.
No, But maybe if I had told them all about space junk and made them worry about the future of those satellites. They'd be worried about the next time they got on an airplane, whether this satellite that's navigate, that's helping their flight navigate, is potentially being exposed to high speed GARBAE.
All right, Well, let's talk about it. The idea is that maybe space we're throwing too many things out there into space, like as a species. You know, it was exciting when we sent the first satellite out there, and it was exciting when we sent people out there. But now I think there's sort of a growing concern that are we basically treating our orbital space as the next big junk yard.
Yeah, exactly, not a landfill, but a space fill.
A space fill. Well, I guess technically landfills are space field.
Everything is a space fil from that perspective. Well, I was surprised. I did a bit of research, and I was surprised to discover sort of the small number and the large number of stuff that we have in orbit.
Really it's both a lot and little.
Yeah it is. I mean the small number is the number of operational satellites. Like we've been launching satellites for fifty years, and I know it's expensive. It's not just like anybody can launch them. But they're not that rare anymore. And you know, vermen's and spy agencies and armies all have their own satellites and companies do. So I was surprised to discover that there are only about two thousand, two hundred and eighteen operational satellites in orbit. That's not really that many.
Really do you think that's not a lot?
I think it's not a lot. I mean, these days it's not that expensive to launch a satellite. You know, elementary schools can fund us a micro's cube sat that ends up in orbit and takes pictures of stuff. So the prices are really coming down.
So it's two thousand, two hundred and eighteen not just like the big ones you see with the giant solar panels, but it could be just like little tiny satellites.
Yeah, some of those are pretty small. Some of those are pretty small. But we only got two thousand, two hundred. You know, like how many cars are on a freeway at any moment. It's much bigger number than that, and so, and space is really big, and so at first you think, wow, there's not that many satellites. And space is huge, so there's plenty of room for more traffic. Nothing to worry, nothing to worry about. But the problem is that it's not just operational satellite that are out there, right, it's for small unoperational satellites, and then bits of satellites, junk of satellites, little bits of rockets that blew up, you know, stuff that astronauts dropped while they were on spacewalks. It turns out there's a lot of junk up.
There, really, and it's all man made? Or is it also like you know, asteroids to somehow got caught in or orbit or things like that.
This is just man made space junk. I mean, there are meteors right that hit the Earth and burn them in the atmosphere, and you see that kind of stuff on a nice night when you're seeing meteor showers, et cetera. But this is just man made stuff that's in orber.
Wow, how many do you how much of this stuff do you think is out there?
So they did a calculation and you can't count this stuff because a lot of it is too small. But you know, we have two thousand operational satellites right, But in terms of space junk there's at least twenty thousand trackable objects. That's just like chunks of.
Stuff that you can see that you can see.
That like you know, Norrid and the Department of Defense and all those folks are keeping track of.
Wow, don't they wonder what they are?
Like?
Could those be spy cameras from Aliens? Is where I'm going with this, Daniel Man.
I know, I would love if there were a spy camera. But if I was an alien and I wanted to build a spy camera, I would just put it in a rock, you know'd hide it and make it look like a big asteroid or something. But this is just the stuff they're tracking, you know, because they don't want their two billion dollars spy satellite or ten billion dollar space telescope or whatever to bump into a piece of junk. So they track this stuff. But that's only the stuff that they can track.
They track it so that they can so it doesn't so they can maneuver around the other space trunk.
Yeah, it's like air traffic control, right, You want to get this out to land, so you have to make sure none of the other planes are too close by, and so you've got to manage it, and so they keep track of all this stuff. But it's a ten to one ratio, right.
Did the two thousand operational objects include the secret space spy satellites that they don't really want us to know? Or are those in the unknown category?
Doesn't include the things that the government doesn't want us to know, but reasonable estimates based on launches and stuff like that, because it's pretty hard to hide a launch.
So they can track twenty thousand objects. And are these small or are these like you know, a bolt from that slipped out of the space station or are they pretty big?
These things are pretty big. You know, they're more than ten centimeters across. You know, the largest fifteen hundred of these things weigh a total of nineteen hundred tons, and the largest ten thousand of them weigh like five five hundred tons, So it's a pretty big amount of stuff. And again, this is just the stuff that we can track. The stuff falls apart and gets smaller, and then the numbers get crazy.
And this is all just human junk in space. Like we've been we've been that careless in space that we have twenty thousand bits of junk out there.
You showed to like a national park, and this is like littered with people's picnic garbage.
I guess if you're out in space, what do you do with your junk?
Well, actually, what you do is you drop it on Earth. The best thing to do with space junk is to push it down into the atmosphere, because the atmosphere will burn it up. Anything from space is moving pretty quickly and if it hits the atmosphere, it'll just get fried. So the best thing to do is to drop it on the Earth. The worst thing to do is to leave it in orbit around the Earth.
I see. The best thing to do is to burn it in the atmosphere so it rains down on innocent people.
Almost nobody has ever been hurt by falling space junk. The atmosphere is a really good force field against space junk. It's so good that what we should do with our space junk is throw it against the atmosphere to atomize it.
Oh.
I see, So this is stuff that has maybe falling off the space station or slipped out of an astronaut's hand, but that stayed in orbit.
Yeah, and also the products of other collisions. And if you look at even smaller stuff, there are nine hundred thousand things that are smaller than ten centimeters. That's almost a million pieces of.
Space junky bits. But those they can't track, and that's just an estimate.
These are not tiny bits. I mean ten centimeters. You know, we're talking to something the size of a baseball. Like that thing going at ten kilometers per second is not a tiny anything. But you're right, these things are too small for them to track.
That's a lot of baseballs.
It's a lot of baseballs. And then if you just say like any piece of junk, no matter what size, then there are more than one hundred million bits of space debris.
And so where did all this stuff come from? Is it all just from you know, our astronauts being little bugs or little space bugs?
Yeah, you know astronauts like these flameing hot cheetos and they just crumple up the package and toss it over their shoulder.
It so responsible.
No, it comes from like satellites falling apart, you know, bits of paint flaking off of satellites. Also, we fire a lot of rockets into space and we just sort of like leave those spent rocket stages and little bits of like frozen fuel that didn't get used up. We just generally haven't been thinking carefully about what kind of stuff will be left from our exploration of space, because we thought, hey, space is so big and empty, it doesn't really matter if you create one thousand little shards of ice that are flying at really high speed.
Wow, So it is getting crowded with joke. I mean, there aren't that many satellite but there's millions of bits of stuff out there.
There are millions of bits of stuff out there. You have flakes of paint, little bits of rocket motors, frozen coolant, and you know, sometimes it's stuff that was created sort of on purpose. Like in the sixties, the US and Russia had anti satellite weapons. We built special missiles we could fire at like the enemy's satellites because you know, maybe you don't want them flying their Spice satellites over Colorado, and so you want to fire our missile to take out their satellite.
Interesting space wars, space wars.
Wars, Yeah, and it. China got in the game about ten years ago. They built a system and they tested it and they destroyed one of their own satellites, but it created a million pieces of space debris that are still up there.
They blew something up as a test.
Yeah, they fired a missile into space in two thousand and seven and blew up one of their own defunct satellites and it created a million pieces of space junk.
Great.
Wow.
And sometimes it is astronauts, you know, like there was one time an astronaut lost a bag of tools. You know, you're out there in a space lot, you forget to clip it, and the oops, it just sort of drifts away from you.
And that was a Sandra Bullock movie. I seen that movie, Daniel. That's fiction.
That's the one part of that movie that was correct. An astronaut. One was like lost spare glove. You know, so that kind of stuff is floating out there, but it's dwarfed by the sort of like little just pieces of junk from satellites that are broken or smashed into each other.
I wonder how that happens. You're like, you're out in space, you might die, but you take off your glove just just to like pick it a little something, and then whoops, you let you got.
To open your flame and hot cheetos package, right, you can't do those and those really thick.
Gloves, yeah, those big thick fingers.
And then you take the cheetos up and sort of bang them up against your space helmet, you know, Oops, make this thing through the shooter.
Use velcrow for the cheetos.
No, I think there must have been an extra glove or something. But occasionally astronauts have job stuff that's not a big contribution to the space junk. Most of it is like flakes of paint and little bits of rocket coolant and stuff like that, but it's still dangerous.
And how much of that is our space cheetos?
There are no Cheetos in space that I'm aware of, Eilon, that's her first for you also great.
So that's a lot of stuff out there. And so I guess now the question is is it a problem? Is it going to be a problem? And what can we do about it? So let's get into that, But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, Daniels, So there are millions of pieces of debris out there in just in our immediate orbit, and some of them might be space cheetos. Some of them might not be. We don't know what the Chinese or the Russians have been developing out there or testing.
Maybe they have a system to launch cheetos into space at our satellites.
Yes, right, maybe cheetahs are especially good at taking out spy satellites, you.
Know, I mean, until you do the experiment, you never know the answer. You've got to keep an open mind in science, right.
Yeah, you want you want that, you know, that cheesy powder that they have to get into the enemy's satellite mechanism the worst.
That's the worst for those gyro mechanisms. Yeah, that's r especially designed by food scientists to be a space weapon.
It gets all over your spy LANs and then it's all ruined.
Space junk. Really is a problem, Okay.
So it is a problem that scientists are concerned about right now.
It really is. Yeah, And it's a problem sort of for two reasons. One is that it's a danger to the stuff that's out there, and the other is that it's likely to make more of itself. So first of all, you worry just like, is the stuff going to bump into something valuable? I mean, you build your complicated space telescope or spy side light or whatever, and you shoot it up into space and then somebody's junk comes along at like ten to fifteen kilometers per second and just trashes it.
Wow, fifteen kilometers per second. Like, is that if it's in a different orbit or like, you know, like an You kind of tend to think in space that's everything being kind of at the same speed that you are. But is it possible for things to be in a different orbit and come at you at speed?
Absolutely? This is not organized self driving cars in space right where everything is moving along with no relative velocity. There's lots of different orbits that cross right and there's no traffic lights, and so you get free for all. It's a free for all exactly. There's no cops up there whistling to people to stop or anything, and so your orbit path could totally cross somebody else's orbital path.
That's a problem. Even if flick of pink would probably do some harm to your you know, solar panel or Cheeto's bag, for sure.
A tiny fleck with paint going at fifteen kilometers per second is like getting punched by Mike Tyson, right, And nobody wants their satellite getting punched by Mike.
Tyson, especially in space. That would be extra embarrassing.
But maybe NASA should do that, you know, they should have like last pre flight check, Mike, Please come down and punch the satellite and see how it goes. But it's a real problem. And you know, sometimes you can protect parts of your satellite. We'll talk about that later, but some parts you just can't. Like you don't want to build a shield in front of the lens of your space telescope. That's why you built it, right to look out into space. Or you have these big solar panels, you can't really do much to protect them. They're supposed to be out there gathering sunlight, so you're really vulnerable.
And even if you put armor on your satellite, that just gets more expensive, right, because every little ounce you send into space costs like thirty thousand dollars, right.
Yeah, you can't armor your solar panels because that blocks them that they don't work. So it's a real problem. And they try to keep track of this stuff and because they don't want their expensive satellites to get hit by space junk, and so they have, you know, as we were saying, tracking on like twenty thousand of these things. And they observe a lot of close calls. There's something like twenty close calls every day really between a satellite and some piece of trackable junk.
Like every day, twenty one times there's somebody freaking out in some control room going turn left, turn left, watch out for that space de breeth.
Yeah, And they're pretty careful about this stuff, and so they have to like contact the owners of the satellite and say, hey, some piece of junk is coming your way. You might want to move up or down, or left or right or just any direction really to get.
Out of the way. Oh wow, are there like traffic controllers or space can you can I study to be a space traffic controller?
Yeah? I think it's a pretty stressful job. But the Defense Department does this, you know, because they got a lot of satellites up there that are pretty valuable and pretty important for national security, and so they keep track of this stuff and they contact satellite owners if their satellite is in the path of some junk.
Oh wow, imagine getting that call.
Yeah, I think it's not too unusual, you know. I think most satellites a few times a year have to maneuver around space junk because it's getting kind of crowded up there. And we've even had collisions.
Really, what happens? You just obliterate the satellite or.
Yeah, yeah, that's the problem is that when two like defunct satellites hit each other, or when a piece of space junk takes out of satellite, what do you get more space junk more?
Right, that's the other problem you were saying, and you said junk begets junk.
Yeah, it's like if you litter in the park, somebody else walks by, like, Oh, looks like this park isn't cleaned up too much. I'll just dump all my trash here. But I'm not sure that analogy works, but the idea.
Is wondering how that works. It's more like if you if you find a piece of litter in the park and you go to grovit, it turns into two pieces of liters, right.
Yeah, I guess so. Or this litter attacks you and breaks you into pieces of literal in.
Park right, rane covers you and Cheetos does.
It's terrible, But the idea is that, yeah, that if a piece of space junk hits a satellite, it causes more space junk, and then the number of pieces of space junk grows, and then you have a higher chances of making more space junk, which of course just makes more space junk. And so you can see this sort of cascade effect as possible. You get enough stuff out there, the chances of collision grow very quickly, and then the chances have become almost certain, and then you just have space is just totally filled with junk.
Right, dangerous junk, right, that you can't get through.
Yeah.
And so some sort of space groups advocacy groups predict the sort of tipping point we're going to get too much junk pretty soon, that you're going to get this cascade effect and it might destroy a huge number of things in orbit and basically make space unusable.
You can actually kind of extrapolate and see the point where it's just the jungle just multiply beyond making space reachable.
Yeah, because you can't fly a rocket with people in it through space if it's totally filled with space junk. You can't launch a satellite into that orbit if it's totally filled with space junk. And if all the satellites that we had out there right now ended up getting hit by space junk and turning into more space junk, you'd have an enormous number of pieces of junk, and it would make space basically unusable.
You know what we need, I think, Daniel, we need like a giant space vacuum that would totally suck space already has a vacuum.
Why doesn't space just suck it up into outer space? Suck it up space? But it's you know, it's already sort of a problem. Like we have people out there in space right now in the space station, and these folks a few times a year have to move the whole space station like into a higher orbit really in order to avoid some piece of junk that's coming nearby.
They're actively doing, you know, like frogger just like changing names all the time.
Space and sometimes they have to like rush the astronauts into one of those escape capsules because the big pieces of junk is coming. They didn't spot soon enough and can't get out of the way, and it might like you know, debilitate the space station and those folks would have to basically fly back down to Earth.
I feel like you're courting that tender Bullock movie again.
I think it might go the other way around. I think the Center Bolt movie is based on real events.
So and I think it also happened with the Space Shuttle once, right, like it like it actually did some damage to the Space Shuttle.
Oh, all the time, every Space Shuttle comes back is pitted with space junk. You'll find like holes in the wings, they find scratches in the windshield. It's not unusual when the Space Shuttle comes back to find like, you know, bits of stuff embedded in the windshield all the way down to like half the depth of the windshield. Yeah, exactly.
You're like, what is that? Squeaks? Quick? Is that Cheetos?
What?
How did that get in there?
Yeah?
It's a it's a dirty environment out there, and so you know how you're driving down the highway you end up with like a bunch of bugs on your windshield. Imagine those bugs were going you know, ten times a speed of sound or.
Something, or there were like ball bearings just all over the highway. That would be pretty dangerous.
Yeah, it would be pretty dangerous. And so it's a real problem. We got to make sure there's not too much space junk up there, and we got to clean it up sort of before it gets too late, before it starts to multiply out of control.
Okay, I have a new product idea for elon Musk.
Already, I'm sure I'm not ready.
Giant space windshield wipers, that's what.
We mean, cleanse the atmosphere. Well, you know we're going to talk about solutions to the space junk problem. And that's not the dumbest one that's on the list.
Oh really, all right, it's already taken. It was already in a movie, would sender Bullock? So that effects our ability to go out into space? Does it affect actually us here on Earth if space gets filled with junk?
Well there's sort of the direct problem and the indirect problem. Direct problem is like do you have to worry about a piece of junk falling out of space and conking you on the head, right right, Well, there's about one piece of space junk per day that falls out of orbit and into the atmosphere, but those burn up. Right. As we were saying before, it's actually a good thing for space junk to hit the atmosphere because it gets fried, it gets shredded, and it's just a nice, you know, another meteor in the night sky. It's pretty rare for this stuff to actually hit the Earth. There was once in nineteen ninety seven a woman in Oklahoma was hit by a piece of rocket, but usually you didn't worry about it. Like the Air Force when they launch rockets, they don't even really care where they go because they just mostly burn up.
Oh, I see, of course it had to be Oklahoma. I feel.
Where else are you saying Oklahoma deserves it? Or just like weird stuff happens in Oklahoma.
I'm saying if I was writing a Steven Spielberg movie where a piece of junk hits and women in the head, it would probably be an Oklahoma.
All right, that's good to know, But I think the more direct issue for people out here is that we rely on stuff in space. When your flight is taking off, it's using a navigational system that relies on satellites. When your phone is locating itself because you got lost while going for a hike. It's using GPS. So our society really relies on space technology. And if all that was destroyed or became unusable, you know, hey, listening to Daniel Jorge explaining the universe would take longer to download.
You would get lost trying to get to some Wi Fi or something.
Yeah, precisely. So it's important part of our society. We want to maintain it. It's not really a direct danger to you unless you're an astronaut, but it's important that we take care of the space near the Earth.
Right, it's not good. It's not good.
It's not good.
All right, let's get into what we can actually do to maybe clean up some of the space junk maybe or prevent it or work around it. But first, let's take another quick break.
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All right, Daniel, So space junk is a little bit of a problem, and you you're also telling me it's kind of a problem or it might become a problem for astronomers too, right, like people trying to study space.
Yeah, there's been a big uproar recently because of Elon Musk's plans to basically fill space with satellites. He's launched, you know, something like one hundred and twenty of these things so far, and then sort of low Earth orbit and they streak across the sky. And if you have really valuable time on a telescope because you want to study something super far away and you've been waiting months for your like ten hours of telescope time, and then Musk satellites just sort of zoom in from the lens. You know, then you get a big streak.
You don't want that photobomb.
You don't want that photobomb. And he's only launched one hundred. He's planning to launch thousands and thousands of these things. So astronomers are worried, first of all, like, is he going to be blocking your review? Is ground based astronomy going to be impossible in the near future just to improve our Internet access? But then also from the space junk point of view, like you got thousands of things up there, one of them goes wrong, umps into another one, like it could pretty quickly go bad.
I mean, if it was Bill Murray, you'd be like, hey, that's a cool photo bomb on my photo. But elon Musk, that's just annoying.
Yeah, precisely. And remember you know you have ten times as many things up there. It's a hundred times more likely to get collisions because you have many more ways to get collisions right, And so he's planning to launch thousands of these things, and just a few of them have to go wrong for it to sort of cascade and create a disaster.
Reach that tipping point where it all just pulverizes everything and it becomes a deadly barrier for space travel.
Yeah, he's thought of this, of course, and he has a plan, and you know, NASA and FAA or whatever say that his plan is good and essentially involves making sure that any of these satellites that go wrong basically just fall and then they get burned up in the atmosphere. And that's not a terrible plan because that's what we want. We want to push all this stuff, all the space junk down into the atmospheres. The atmosphere does the job for us of the atmosphere basically melts all this stuff.
So how does that work? So that's one way we can kind of avoid the space junk problem is to make sure it comes down. But how can they do that if it, like, if said satellite becomes disabled, what's going to make it actually maneuver into the atmosphere.
Well, you can just get lucky and hope that it's the way that it maneuvered or got disabled makes it fall. But you know, there's a lot of stuff out there that's in stable orbits. And one thing we can just do is wait, you know, stop launching stuff and just wait because eventually all this stuff will fall. Remember, the atmosphere is not just like a turnoff. There's no perfect space in near Earth. There's a very slight atmosphere and it drags on stuff and slows it down.
Right, But the problem isn't the problem that it's just one piece per day that falls. It wouldn't that take you know, three hundred years?
How it would take a long time. So that's not really a solution. So people have some crazy ideas, you know. One of them, of course involves lasers.
Of course, Hey, physicists, how should we solve a problem? Lasers?
No?
No, I just really want to comb my hair? Oh yeah, don't you.
Want to know what the problem is first though? Just lasers? Lasers, that's right. The solution is always lasers, and the answer is always aliens. No, but lasers is not a terrible idea because if you could shoot a laser at this stuff, you could slow it down.
You could. You don't even need to blow it up, right, you don't want to blow it up. Would you want to do is slow it down a little bit so it drops and then the atmosphere takes over, so you just got to sort of like a blate it a little bit on the side. I remember we talked about those guys that are also using lasers to maybe save the Earth from incoming asteroids. It's a similar idea. You don't have to blow up the whole asteroid. You just got to sort of shave off a little velocity on one size so it misses. In this case, you want to just sort of like rough it up a little bit so that it falls into the atmosphere.
Wow.
Like literally you'd be like Peo Peo, Peo, Peo Peo taking stuff out out of the sky.
He's there for the test. That's exactly what it sounded like.
I'm oh, really, well, I imagine I can foresee what physicism but sound effect that would.
Put, you know, shooting death rays into the sky. It would take a lot of death rays. And so this approach, of course has some problems. So people studied about ten years ago, but it doesn't seem like it's really going to solve sort of the larger scale problem really of having one hundred million objects.
So my son practicing video games all this time just to get ready for that job of shooting down space degree, I should tell them there's no career in that.
That's right, Yeah, I think you know that was very impressive long range planning. But I'm hoping there are other ways that you're still can make money with those skills.
Okay, So that so shooting them down with lasers not a great, good long term solution. What are other ways we can solve this space junk probe?
Well, another one is a ship called clean Space one which looks, I'm not joking, like a big net and the idea is to gather space junk together and then again dump it into the atmosphere. Right, it's sort of weird, but we're treating the whole earth as like a trash can and the Clean Space up. What you got to do is gather the stuff and then dump it into the trash can. And so this is maybe your son could operate this thing, you know, steer this thing around, gathering space jump.
That's what every parent wants for your son to be a space janitor, thank you, Daniel.
Hey, it's pretty glamorous. I mean, space janitors. Come on, that's the way you work your way up, right, That's how you become an astronaut. You've got space, you get a job as a janitor, and then, you know, step by step, eventually you're piloting the space station.
I mean, space chanitor is just like, you know, barely a step above podcasters, so.
At least it's a step up. But that's not a joke, you know, this is an idea. Gather the stuff and then dump it into lower orbit and hope that it eventually decays down to burn up.
So this would be what does it look like like a giant Like a giant like four rockets holding a giant net in between them.
It looks basically, yeah, like a big net. You know, it's got like four big arms and some lines between them, and they would essentially just like reach out like a tuck a huge claw, grab a piece of space junk and then drag it down into lower orbit. But this would work for you know, maybe like the twenty thousand defunct large trackable objects we have, but it wouldn't really help clean up all the other tiny stuff.
All right, So then what can we do about those?
Not that much? I mean, one thing we can do is we can stop adding more stuff.
Right, when has it ever worked with humanity?
We could start being responsible. I promise starting today, we're gonna be good. Really this time, this time it's gonna be We're gonna be good.
I'm gonna stop eating those cheetos tomorrow. Tomorrow.
But here actually is a bit of hope because Americans, at least American space agencies have tried to design their rockets to produce less space junk. So create like a smaller number of larger pieces of debris that are more likely to fall into the atmosphere, and they don't like explode bits of coolant into space because earlier we're like, oh, we don't care whatever it's out in space, but now we do care. And so our more recent rock gets produced less space junk per launch.
Per launch, or per like if you lose it, no per launch per launch.
Yeah, every time you launch a rocket, there's stages of it that are supposed to burn up and don't. Always there's bits of coolant that you know, that leak or solid rocket fuel that wasn't burnt up. And so our more recent rockets are better at that, they produce less junk per launch, but still they do produce junk. So you know, that's that's not a way to clean it up. It's just a way to like be bad less quickly.
So I think what I'm getting from you is that to solve the space junk problems, scientists have come up with a couple of solutions. One is, wait a million years, that solves a lot of problems. To convince you manage to stop littering that'll never happen. Or three shoot lasers at it.
Yeah, and so we're all waiting for your son to be good enough at the laser to solve this problem.
Doesn't sound like there's a good solution here.
No, there's not a great solution to cleaning up space junk. And so in the interim, what we've done is just trying to protect our satellites. You put a shield around it to try to protect it, and they're pretty clever. This is really cool design. It's called a Whipple shield. And the ideas don't just like make your satellite really heavy with armor, but put a really light, thin shield, but have it be separated from the satellite a little bit. And the idea is that it doesn't destroy the space junk, is sort of deflects it, It turns it, it breaks it up and changes its direction.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah, and so you're more likely to survive impact with space junk, and so you know, we have some technology to protect ourselves. But yeah, we sort of painted ourselves into a corner here. Space is filled with junk and it's not an easy way to clean it up.
Well, hopefully there's maybe in the future space general will be like the most valuable profession on the planet.
Yeah. Now, I think we also just need to find some new way to put the cost of making space junk on the people producing it, because right now the cost of space junk is on the people launching a new satellite. Like you have a billion dollar satellite, you have to protect yourself from the space junk. The people whose satellite made that, they're free and clear, they don't really care. So somehow we need to make sure that the people who are producing space junk bear the cost of it. And maybe that'll help fund to clean up somehow.
Interesting, it's like carbon credits, but for a space junk.
Yeah. Or we need everybody to have like an insurance card so that when things bump into each other, I say, hey, that was your piece of junk. Now you owe me a billion dollars.
Oh interesting, So more more like cars. Actually, then you know we're creating a traffic jam up there.
Yeah, we need more lawyers to solve this problem.
Space lawyers, space lawyers. All right, maybe I'll try to steer my son towards that profession. It sounds like it might have war.
That's right, that'll impress his grandparents.
Also, all right, well, it sounds like there are a lot of things out there in space that you might run into, and it's going to get crowdier crowder in the next couple of years.
Yeah, and cheatier and cheetoh here.
That's right, and spicier in flaming high and hot, well, hopefully flaming hot, because that means.
It's burning up. Yeah, what happens if you drop a space cheeto? Actually, it does get flaming hot right as it burns up in your entry. So yeah, in space, all cheetos are flaming hot. There you go.
How can we ask for a better add link to the podcast.
So think about that next time you were going to launch your own micro satellite into space. Do you really need that out there or are you just contributing to the problem.
So next time you look out there into space at night, think about that. Beautiful story you might be looking at could be a piece of Cheetoh.
I got nothing after that. That's it all.
Right, everybody, Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed that.
Thanks everyone, see you next time. Before you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Joorge that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Daniel Andhorge dot com. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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