Space Junk, Ahoy!

Published Mar 25, 2021, 9:00 AM

The orbits hundreds to thousands of miles above Earth are littered with garbage. Space garbage, sure, but it’s still garbage. Littering in space is bad enough but it poses practical problems too – like space junk crashing into satellites or astronauts.

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Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh astro Clark, and there's Charles after Burn, Bryant okay, and Jerry Goose Roland is out there. Way do you call me after burning because I'm gassy? Yep, although we've been we've been tooting for a year straight and no one even no, I don't care except us. Have you ever set one of your ducks on fire? Have I ever lit a fart? I was hoping to not use that word, but yes, uh yeah, I used to. There was a period in my youth where I thought that was just about the funniest thing ever. And I still think it's pretty hysterical. I just don't do it. I never thought it was funny. I've always just been more wowed by it. You know. It's I'm mean, the notion of it, now as I've gotten older, is more funny than the act itself. The notion that we can expel flammable cats from our But it's pretty great. And then do you remember that cautionary tale that um that if you lit it, it it could travel up into your rectum and cook your inside some sort of a reverse thing. There must have just been like some I don't know, some department somewhere, some obscure federal agency that was tasked with coming up with fake cautionary tales to scare kids out of doing things that where they weren't behaving, you know. Yeah, And I think what my most cherished memories were the times where people swore that it wasn't possible, that oh that you couldn't light it, they wouldn't work. Yeah, So proving proving that was always sort of the most fun because it was just like hilarity ensued, and also you just got to be like in your face, like literally come down here, because I'm gonna light this in your face if you're just so sure it's not going to catch fire. And I always had a theory that it would get rid of the smell kind of instantaneously too. I think it just burned it out. I think it did. So it's really an efficient way of clearing the air. What are we doing? Well, we're talking chuck about space junk and actually not the band, the whole thing. What there's a immediately had to look it up because I was going to say a great band name, but there's a band out of Buffalo named space Junk. Yeah, out of Buffalo. I guess that. I guess that um that affords being mentioned. Sure, sure um, Okay, So space Junk, not the band, the actual stuff stuff floating around in space. It turns out there's a lot of it. And I actually have a little bit of an intro here. I'm gonna do a little, um a little. It wasn't the lighting, No, that was a pre showed tangent. Okay, I think it's that classification. No UM. Back in the seventies, there is a guy who worked for NASA called Donald Kessler, and he was an interesting cat in and of himself, but one of the claims to fame that he has is that his name became synonymous with a um an unstoppable chain reaction of collisions of space junk called the Kessler syndrome. And the Kessler syndrome that Kessler came up with is based on this idea that if you get enough stuff floating around in orbit around Earth, eventually this stuff is going to smash into other stuff up there because these things are traveling at very high speeds, and when they smash in another they're going to potentially break into more and more pieces, and then those pieces are going to go on and they're going to smash into other things, and so this chain reaction will begin to where there's just pieces constantly smashing into one another, and all of a sudden were trapped on Earth because we can't make it through the debris field we accidentally created. Hence the ks the Kessler sin drome has struck again like a like a far being lit in your face, but in the face of humanity as a whole. Yeah, and I think some some scientists these days say that parts of our orbit are already like that, right, Yeah, there, Yes, So Kessler was basically saying he made these predictions in the seventies um and he he said, based at the rate that we're going, will probably will reach a critical mass or in about thirty to forty years. And a lot of people said, well, we've reached that point, and I think Kessler is actually right. The thing is, we can't really see everything that's up there, so we have to make guesses and assumptions. We actually track a very respectable amount of space chunk considering that we're just down here on Earth, that we actually can track things going really fast that are really small, traveling really far above the Earth. But there's a lot of it that's just too small for our current technology to track. So we have to make guesses about what all is up there. And it looks like there's a lot of stuff up there, and it's possible we have reached critical mass and this this cascading collision, the chain reaction, it just hasn't started yet. Yeah, I mean, I was just about to correct myself when I said some people say it's already there, that I didn't mean. It's all just so people understand it's already like we can't travel through these places, but that process has started such that it can't be reversed, Like even if we stop launching anything, they're like, it's too late. Yeah, once that chain reaction starts, I mean, there's nothing we can do about it. I mean, we can't even get a lot of the space chunk that's up there out now. I can't imagine when they've started on a chain reaction. That's got to make catching it even even more difficult. So a lot of people say, well, let's do everything we can to avoid that cascade inclusion that Kessler syndrome from ever starting and a lot of people sitting out there chuck, I'm guessing are like, wait, what are you guys talking about with space Chunk? What is the space Chunk? Yes, I'm well versed with the band from Buffalo. I have all of their CDs. I got them all for free just walking past this one street corner many times over multiple years. But I don't know about the actual space junk. And it never occurred to me that the band space Junk is based on a real thing, right, so space junk I kind of always assume people knew what this was. But we've made that assumption before about things like I don't know trees, and people said, why don't you just grub what a tree is? Parrots? So, oh, by the way, thanks for all the parrot pictures from all over the world. Has been delightful. But space junk is you know, it can be a lot of things. NASA actually has a sort of a list that describes it better than we could. UM. A lot of it is abandoned spacecraft or spacecraft that doesn't work anymore, so we abandon it. Um. This can be big, full spaceships, or it can be parts of spaceships. Because as we'll learn and as you know, if you follow, you know, if you're a rocket enthusiast, like those things break apart, and we'll get to that, but there are many pieces that are quite large that are just sort of left up there until they come back down or they hit something else. Um. Some of this stuff is, like I said, parts of rockets that have broken apart, usually upper stage, because that lower stage stuff breaks off early enough to where it generally, you know, after a few years, may tumble back towards Earth, burn up hopefully so where nothing actually hits Earth, but that upper stage stuff is kind of stuck up there. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's one thing that you'll you'll find out about things that we place into orbit. The further away from Earth that this thing is circling the Earth, um, the the longer it's going to take to come back down to Earth. So that, yeah, because it's the force of gravity that pulls these things in orbit back down to Earth eventually. Right. Yeah. What else? Uh? What else do we have? Motor affluent? Yeah, so a lot of unspent fuel, a lot of cocket fuel, a solid fuel and then kids, I was looking it up, that includes ammonium nitrate appropriately enough, but it all yeah, um and enemy um. But it also includes gunpowder, black gunpowder. That's what they use as solid rocket fuel sometimes, which is like we've come really far, but also not far at all, you know. Um. So there's canisters of of gunpowder floating around up in space, which are particularly problematic because not only can they break things apart, they can really break things apart because they may explode when they impact things going as fast as they travel. Uh. And then the last thing, and we'll get to all the detail about all this stuff and why it's dangerous. But little bitty, little tiny things, little tiny flex of paint, even millions of them, can cause a lot of damage. I think there was, you know, reports from astronauts that say, you know that work on the Hubble that are like, this thing looks like it a car that's been through a hailstorm. You know, it's just like getting constantly pelted, and you think a speck of paint, who cares. But when these things are going twenty something miles an hour, it can cause some damage. Yeah. I think his famous quote back to ground Control was this thing looks like a seventy two nova. So when we when we The thing about space junk is that you have to remember is every single bit of it used to be here on Earth, and every single bit of it was launched by humans. That's just space junk. There's plenty of other stuff out in space, like asteroids and comets and pieces of rocks flying around. That's not space. Yeah, et s flying around, Um, that's not space junk. Space junk is specifically things that humans have launched into Earth. So there's this whole kind of air of um oh, I don't know the actual word for it, but that we've we've done this to ourselves, like we've created our own problem and now we we've made this bed that we have to lie in or figure out how to get out of because it's so human. Yeah, isn't it that, like let's destroy the Earth, let's start destroying space because we may want to live up there, so we might as well pre destroy it before we get up there to really destroy it. And it makes sense though early on in the space programs, you know, starting in the with the launch of Sputnik, that's when the whole thing started. But you know, it makes sense that we had the technology get things up there, but not to get them back down, and we knew that eventually their their orbit was going to decay, they would be pulled down into the atmosphere where it would probably burn up. So that made sense at the beginning of the space race. But as we got better and better at technology, the idea that we could just litter space became less and less acceptable. The problem is it didn't really go away, Like, there's still basically stuff that's being launched up there today that has no way of being brought back down. It's just like we'll just leave it up there until it runs out of its useful life and then hope for the best. That's kind of how a lot of stuff is being launched into space right now, and it's particularly galling because we have the technology to bring it back down. It just makes the whole thing more expensive, and I think that that's why a lot of um companies and countries don't include that. Yeah, there's a saying among contractors, a joke, if you will, among contractors who build houses and fix up houses. If there's something wrong and that that they're working on and there's the homeowners and around, they just say, I can't see it from my house. I've not heard. That's kind of what's been going on here for years with I mean not only space agencies, but private companies as we'll see, uh, Amazon and Tesla and all kinds of companies have plans to put a lot of a lot more things into space. And it made me wonder, like, who's regulating this stuff. We'll get to all that, But what's kind of cool is since seven when sput Nick was launched into space, nor AD started cat cataloging this stuff and numbering them and naming them, and sput Nick is object number one. And you know they did, they do a really good job of keeping track of a lot of this stuff. Like you said, considering we're down here and it's up there, it's not too bad. Things started breaking apart though, and getting smaller and colliding with one another, creating hundreds and thousands of more smaller bits. But we kind of, you know, our technology progress where we could go smaller in our tracking abilities. And so now the US Department of Defense started cattle logging anything basically larger than I think a softball. I've seen grapefruit too, so yeah, basically that size. If you're not familiar with softballs, but you're crazy for citrus. It's grape fruit size too. If you don't know either one of those, I'm sorry. That's the best we can do. Maybe two of your fists bawled up like good and I don't know how big your fists are A good size snowball. Okay, somebody's like, I'm from the Tropics, I don't know any of this stuff. I'm from Buffalo. I know about snowballs and space jumps and that catalog Chuck. By the way, it is pretty awesome. It contains not just sput nick and all every satellite ever created in every grapefruit size UM piece of debris. But there's some other really interesting stuff in there too. UM. The cremated remains or the canister containing the cremated remains of Gene Roddenberry is one of them. The created star trek UM, the Tesla roadster that UM SpaceX launched up. That one. Yeah, especially when you start learning about the space junk, you're like, this is not a good idea. Yeah, what we don't need to do is just do like pr stuff in space and then you know, like like UM astronauts have lost entire boxes of tools on spacewalks before UM and they're just out there floating around wrenches and stuff like that. They're all in the catalog. They cut that stuff tethered. You gotta tether it. Yeah, sometimes that gets loose or they forget to tether it. Astro nuts. They have hard days too, that's right. They have their their B game on some days. But yeah, anything as small as a softball. They're about twenty thou pieces orbiting the Earth right now. And then there are about half a million pieces the size of a marble or larger that NASA is tracking. And then the paint flex just good luck with that. There's millions of that and no one, no one keeps track of it. Yeah, paint flexes, well, just because we can't. We definitely would if we could, but we just don't have the technology right now because there's so so there's three orbits. I don't want to do an episode on satellites one day, but just briefly, but there's three orbits lowerth orbit, Middle Earth orbit UM, not to be confused with the shire and um uh g O sink in this orbit which is way up there UM, and that's where your communication satellites are there, GEO stationary. They basically if you stand in a spot and could look up and there was a satellite ahead of you or above, you would be there twenty four hours a day, every day of the year. It's it's it's it's moving in in line with one spot around the Earth, and to do that you have to be really far out. The stuff that's further closer to the Earth travels the fastest, and it seems that lower Earth orbit is the most crowded too. So the things that are in lower Earth orbit are traveling the fastest, and there's the most of them because it's the easiest to get to. Right, I feel like that's a pretty good setup if you include our two lighting stories. So maybe we should take a break and talk a little bit about some of the things they're doing to mitigate this right after this. All right, So, there's a lot of space junk out there, a lot of collisions happening. Um. When satellites collide, like I said, they can create just a very much bigger problem by creating lots more smaller pieces. And there are a few countries. The USA is one of them, China's one, India's one that we have used missiles before. They're called anti satellite weapons a SATs to physically damage a satellite, and basically what they do it's very you know, we all kind of laughed when Armageddon came out about sending people up there to drill holes and then drop bombs in it. But when you look at some of these things that we've thought to do, they're all kind of rudimentry like that, Like let's just send something in there and ram it into a satellite. Yeah, shoot a missile at that thing the old fashioned way. Yeah, that's called a kinetic kill model, which is it's exactly that you shoot a missile at a satellite or something up in space and you blow it into smithereens a is a yosemite. Sam would say, right, so, um, you don't want to do this, but a lot of countries do, like you listed, Um, they have not only just the technology, but have actually done this, have run these tests. And I think it's kind of a two show of twofold Show of Force where you're showing that like I can launch really technically sophisticated stuff up there that I don't want anyone else to know about, and then I can destroy it before you could ever possibly find out about it. Or I don't like your satellite and what it's doing. I'm going to shoot that thing out of the sky. I just showed all of you that I'm capable of doing it. So so it makes sense, so I guess in a geopolitical way, but up in space it makes zero sense because when you blow up a satellite or something, you blow it up into thousands of pieces of um that grapefruit, softball snowball size um uh debris, and then millions of smaller pieces, and all of a sudden, the population that catalog of space chunk just increased by ten or fifteen or twenty um depending on how big the explosion wasn't how much debris it created. Yeah, and you might think, because there have been satellites launched basically continuously for you know, many many decades now, that they're banging into each other at a decent rate. But that's actually not the case yet as far as actual satellite collisions. In February two thousand nine, the very first one happened, um the cosmos with a K, so you know where that one's from. The twenty Cosmos out of Russia collided and it was defunct, collided with I think a private one from a US company called Irridium, which sounds like a total sci fi movie, bad guy company. I know, I don't actually know. It doesn't strike me like that. I get what you're saying, but I think it's a very pleasant word. Okay. It makes me think of the rainbow centrum vitamin logo kind of oh, Ridium find it very Yeah, Well, one guy's evil corporation, there's another guy's rainbow fighting. That's right. Uh. They were traveling at a speed relative to each other about twenty two thousand miles an hour and blew them up into you know, two thousand pieces at least four inches in diameter, and then like you said, thousands and thousands and millions of tinier and tinier pieces. Right. So this is the first time that was two thousand nine where they where two satellites rammed into each other as as far as we know, and I think it hasn't happened again yet right now. But the thing is is, because there's so many satellites up there and we're launching so many more, that um that that it's going to happen again. It's just inevitable that's going to happen again. Because you'll notice, you know, while the Iridium satellite was operational, that Cosmos one was in operational, meaning there's no way to control it or move it. So the only way to avoid this collision is for the Iridium controllers to move their's and I guess they didn't have the warning or what why they didn't move it, because there's as we'll see, there's a there's collision maneuvers where you just basically move your satellite out of the way if you think it's gonna gonna hit something. But that didn't happen with this one. And so because there's so many satellites that are defunct out there that are traveling in opposite directions that really high speeds, of course this is going to happen again. And the Union of Concerned Scientists says that there's something like thirty three I know they're great, UM thirty three hundred and seventy two active satellites in orbit and at least three thousand and more inactive satellites in orbit right now, So it's definitely going to happen again. Yeah, I think the Union of Concerned Scientists logo is I looked it up. It's just UM a silhouette of two uh folded arms with lab coat sleeves, scowling scowling arms. So yeah, it's gonna happen again. I think there was one ESA official, the European Space Agency, and this is paraphrasing, but said, it's basically what we're doing. It's like every time a ship goes out to see just leaving it out there, like eventually this is going to be a real problem. And I know that it's hard to imagine because it's in space, but let me liken it to the ocean and boats and it might get the your thick skulls. Yeah, um, so yeah, it's it's basically a tragedy of the commons that we're seeing right now. Um, but the commons are becoming more and more crowded as the days go by. That thirty three and seventy two active satellites in orbit, I think that as of the beginning of the end of that was a thousand more active satellites than there were in two thousand nineteen, like exponentially. And one of the reasons why it's picking up exponentially is that, um, a lot of companies. I think there's at least eight companies right now that have proposals to release um what you're called mega constellations or swarms of satellites, and you would you would need a swarm of satellites because these things in lower Earth orbit travel so fast that if say, like you're connected to one for your cell phone, it's suddenly gone. So they handed off to the satellite behind them and behind them and behind them, so that you'd be continuous service. So the more of swarm of satellites you have, the more connected you could be. And so some of these proposals like um SpaceX is starlink swarm UM. It aims to to create like global coverage of satellite internet service, so everyone everywhere in the world will be able to connect to really high speed WiFi because of this swarm. So there's a benefit to it. But at the same time, the SpaceX constellation requires twelve thousand satellites. There's only called the swarm. There's only thirty three hundred up there right now, and Elon Musk is saying that he's going to add another twelve thousand just with his swarm. So all of these satellites that are going up in our in the process of going up, are about to make the whole thing a lot more crowded. So yes, the likelihood of a collision just is increasing, um by by orders of magnitude every year from what I can tell. Yeah, and you know, obviously one of the big risks here, and we'll talk about all of them. Something falling on to Earth and hurting people is one of the smaller risks, even though that has happened when sky Lab very famously fell out in the Western Australian outback. Um, but we'll get to that. But that that's not the biggest risk. The biggest risk is for for damage and collisions up there. And we've got a lot of astronauts up there, we have people living on space stations, we have people working on that Hubble telescope. I mean, what't that was the movie Gravity, right? That was space junk that caused their whole thing, right, Yeah, they basically depicted a Kessler syndrome chain reaction. Um, I guess the localized one in that movie from from I had totally forgotten about it, but I kept seeing references to it, so yeah, I kind of remember it now, Like in that why she had to take shelter somewhere with the ghost of George Clooney. Hey, who wouldn't though, you know, did he even exist in that movie? I don't remember. Yeah, is there a theory that he was not real? No, I just didn't remember if like he if like at the end they were like and he never really existed, So he was there. She was just remembering him later or imagining him there later on, right, I think so? I mean I only saw that once. Same here. Yeah. But Um, even stuff like we said, as small as a paint flack, if going twenty two thousand miles an hour, one centimeter paint fleck can inflict enough damage as a or the same amount as a five dred and fifty pound object going about sixty miles an hour here on Earth. And if that goes up to ten centimeters, it would be comparable to a seven kilogram TNT blast paint flex paint fleck. Marble's pretty amazing stuff if you think about it. Um. And actually they've had to replace windows on the Space Shuttle back when the Space Shuttle was in operation in the US. UM, and they they there just be like deep gouges and streaks um taken out of the windows. And when they would analyze and they'd be like, that's paint paint fleck did that. Yeah, And you know the I S S And a lot of our work happens below where most of this stuff is. But it's still a danger. It is a danger. So one of the reasons why it's a dangerous because again, um, the the I S S is it. It's two hundred and fifty miles above Earth, four hundred and three kilometers above the surfaces in lower Earth orbit UM. But it is one of the most vital pieces of space technology that's up there right now. UM. So we want to protect it. We want to keep the I S S safe. UM. The problem is is that there's a lot of stuff above it, and when that stuff eventually comes back down to Earth, it might pass by the I s's coming down, and then the stuff that's also in lower Earth orbit around the I S S could run into it from the side or from the opposite direction UM, or like at a ninety degree plane. So the I S S is constantly under threat. And NASA's UM and I think the E s A. A bunch of different agencies that use the I S S have come up with procedures for basically moving it if if there's a high enough chance that that a collision will occur. And when we talk about high enough chance, we're saying, like one in a hundred thousand chants is enough reason to move the I S. S out of the way. Yeah, And they came up with a pretty um I mean, it seems pretty obvious, but it's a pretty smart way to determine if it's dangerous or not. They said, we need to get an area around these things where we can determine if it's you know, basically a close call or not. And we're gonna call it the pizza box because that's what it looks like. And everybody loves pizza. Everyone knows what pizzas. Do we have to describe that? Please? No, we have an episode on pizza, so go listen to. There's some guy eating a grapefruit. Is like, never heard of pizza. But it's shaped like a pizza box, is flat and it's rectangular. Uh, it's about thirty miles across, a mile deep, thirty miles long. And the idea is that, you know, imagine the I. S. S or whatever important satellite in the middle of this pizza box in space. And they say, if anything, if we predict anything will come within the bounds of that pizza box, then that means that we have to get together and and decide what to do, at least not necessarily take the action, because then you've got to determine the probability of collision. But that's when it gets their attention, I think, right. So if they figure out that there's a one and a hundred thousand chants of UM of collision and moving the I S S isn't going to just be like, well, the mission scrap now because we needed the I S S three ft to the left, um, and now we can't do anything, so just forget it, just forget the whole thing. Um. They will move the I S S. If there's a one in ten thousand chance of collision um and it won't jeopardize the lives of the crew, then they'll move the I S S. Mission be damned, Um, they don't take that lightly. And then one other thing they might do if they don't have time to move the I S S, they'll put the crew into whatever capsule brought them there. If the soy Use rocket that that brought them there is docked, or if one of SpaceX is Dragon capsules is docked. They'll they'll say, go in there and hang out until this this uh predicted m collision passes, but hang out there like it's like a lifeboat basically. Form. Yeah, that's the one. The only one that confused me a little bit. I mean, I get the idea that that's a a good idea to be sort of in the escape pod, but that escape pod can also be crashed as well. Yes, good thinking. You would make a very fine NASA flight engineer. Because, um, I was reading an account of Scott Kelly, one of the Kelly twins, the astronauts who are just so great. Um, Scott Kelly was up on the I s s once as a commander. I think when you're spending that year in space, and um, there was a predicted collision that was enough to tell them to go sit in the Sayers rocket And they said, but don't close the hatch because it's possible that the the capsule could get hit and you might need to get out of the capsule really quick too. But then you know, if the I Sess this hit, you can close the hatch very quickly and and um disembark. I guess, so, yes, yeah, I wonder if they like, they did that for the very first time. They said, just go get in the escape pod. I'm simplifying things of course for Star Wars fans. And they go get in the space pod and close the door and they go they go, all right, we're all good now, right, And then they look at each other and they're like, not really, yeah, that it was were just in another thing. It was an interesting account they were. They were just kind of he said, it was a little tense. But then the time the predicted time of collision came and went, and you know, they were finally like, okay, can we can we get out now? But he said it was a little a little like it was very quiet and they could just hear themselves in one another breathing, and that was about it. But I mean, this dangerous work and they understand this. But the goal is to bring them all back always. But you know, when you go into you know, it's like being a fire firefighter or something. You know that there's a risk that you might not come back. There's gotta be oh yeah, for sure. I just want that to be as minimal as possible. Yes, And they take extraordinary measures to make sure that that it's as minimized as possible for sure. Should we take another break? I think so, man, and we're going to come back and talk about what to do about this space junk problem. Okay, So, um, we I think have established that space junk is kind of a problem, and not just for the I S S, not just for satellites. I think one thing we kind of left out is if these satellites, you know, crash into each other, there's somebody's dish TV gone, how are you gonna watch? Are you gonna watch the Big Game? Then you're not. So space chunk affects US one and all, um, and there's all sorts of other things that could happen. Um, if our satellites start going out, it's not something we want. We also don't want the crew of the I S S to get hurt. But also eventually in the future when we go back to the Moon and then when we travel beyond the Moon, um, we're gonna be needing to go in and out of Earth's orbit and we don't want there to be some crazy to brief field that we have to navigate around or wait to pass or whatever. So this is something we need to to mitigate right now, and it is just beginning to be something that um, some of the space agencies, not all unfortunately in some countries, and some companies are starting to take seriously and figure out how to mitigate. Yeah, I mean think about space tourism and on these companies, they're like, hey, how'd you like to fly up there for a hundred thousand dollars and risk being plowed into by paint flex Right a paint fl being taken out by a paint flight is just undignified. Uh So the u N gets involved a little bit and they say, hey, how about everyone, all you companies sending satellites up there, why don't you promise to remove these things at least twenty five years after the end of their mission. And everyone said, sure, we'll do that. U N. Um, how are you going to enforce that? And the un says, I don't know, we're asking nicely, though, all the space agencies kind of slowly encircled the u N and then grabbed it and gave it a wedgie. But people, I'm kind of joking, But people in these agencies they do know it's a problem they and they are coming up with things kind of Armageddon style. I mean literally space Next is it with you in that movie? I just always thought it was the dumbest thing, Like, how am I supposed to believe this? That this is how they're gonna solve this problem by just blowing this thing up by drilling holes in it and putting bombs in it. And then the more I read about stuff like this, the more I think that's an actual idea that they could do. Yeah. Yeah, I mean we're like maybe a decade off from space mining, I would guess, like mining asteroids. I just I feel like, uh, I don't want to give Michael Bay credit for coming up with a plausible thing, because I just still want to say he's ridiculous. But it's not because they have space nets and they have space harpoons and space magnets and these are some of the things that they actually use to drag these things, uh close enough to where it falls out of orbit and then ideally burns up. Yeah, like removed debris, right, yeah, removed debris was it was kind of cool. The European Space Agency said, you know what, we have this defunct satellite up there called the Vistat, and why don't we just put a bounty on this thing to see what people can come up with and just say, you know, go hog wild and see what you can see what you and do. Bruce Willis, Yeah, you gotta tell them about Embasat and what it is and what it's doing right now through space. Well, I mean it's it's like a it's about the size of a school bus and it's like it's being driven around by a drunk yeah, like auto after he took some rooms or something, totally spinning uncontrollably through space. It's like actually one of the more dangerous things up there in the space debris fields right now. Yeah, So they put out this call said, who's got a good idea, feel free to try it on the embasat if if you want to get close to it. And uh, a group from Surrey University came up with that removed debris system where it was basically a ballistic module that attacked this stuff with a harpoon and a net and pushes or pulls it out of orbit and basically just kind of speeds up the process. It's not like they literally drag it back down to Earth and you know, stand on it and get their picture taken. But they disrupted enough to speak, eat up the process that would inevitably happen anyway. Yeah, it's kind of close to that though, Like there's the test that they ran in two thousand and eighteen, Like the net was successful, the harpoon was successful. But then there it's supposed to also deploy a drag net to like slow the thing down and then make it, you know, fall towards Earth. Um. But the drag net didn't didn't go, but everything else did. Um. And then there was another company, a Swiss company called clear Space that was working directly with the ESA to launch clause little clause that go seek and find um space junk, clamp onto it and then just basically drag it down and uh, to its own death. Kind of like you know, the the guy that you just were you you pushed off the cliff and he grabbed onto your ankle and then at the last second he took you down with him, and you both go. That's what this claw basically does to this poor space chunk. Yeah. The magnet thing kind of and we did a show in Magnets and I remember it kind of broke my brain. But is there such a thing as a magnet? That when it attracts things. There to that question, when it attracts things that stick to the magnet, those things also become magnetized. Oh that's a great question. It's got it, because you know what I'm getting at here is basically a magnet that just keeps growing and growing and growing and just spinning through the universe, collecting everything in its bath until it's this giant thing. Chuck. That is the very title of the third album by Buffalo Space Chunk. It was a long one, not as long as Fiona Apples, but I think it's second place. Her new album is great, by the way. I haven't heard it, but I imagine she's a genius. But I don't know. It's probably silly idea, or maybe just a magnet big enough to collect enough stuff and then blow that thing up, I would guess. I mean, I don't think it's silly idea. I think magnets probably are the wave of the future for this stuff because um, harpoons, claws, all of these things work for say, intact satellites, large ones. And by the way, the e s A backed off of its imfacat bounty because it realized very quickly where many years off from being able to take something that large out of orbit. Um, but it is, it's still hurling uncontrollably through space the size of a school bus. Um. But the the that's still like large pieces that these things take. And as we said, like smaller debris is a real real problem up in space. So I could see it being something like magnets or um whale sharks filter teeth kind of thing, but up in space that somehow collects debris in a bag. I don't know exactly, like yeah, basically like treating it like krill. We need a we need a robot space shark space whale whale sharks years ago, of course. Can you imagine ever forgetting that that was so long ago? Crazy? It really was. It was a good decade, right, No, it had to be. I'm just sort of marveling that we're still doing this. You got a long time left too, So wake up, I hope. So are you telling me to wake up for everyone else? Everybody else? Okay? Um, there are also de orbiting. I mean we have successfully in other companies have successfully de orbited satellites. It is a thing. We don't leave everything up there um SpaceX. I remember, you know, very famously, they have the Falcon rocket that was able to come back down to Earth and be and docking again. It was super cool Don doing. Everybody's talking about him that day too, and he loved it. Yeah, he made the news. Um. Yeah, so that's actually a new best practice is basically reuse stuff. Just get it back out, and even if you can't reuse it again, like SpaceX does with their boosters, at the very least make part of launch satellite the um like like de orbiting the upper stage of the rocket like immediately. There's no reason to just leave your rocket parts up there anymore. Like you can you can attach stuff to it, propulsion systems to get it back down into Earth's atmosphere to burn up if if you're not going to reuse it. So that's a definite best practice that's emerging for sure. The Falcon worked though, right, didn't that thing land safe? Dude? I saw it with my own eyes. Yeah. I saw the heavy M boosters land with my own eyes, and he synchronized them. They came down at the same time, landed at the same time after launching a rocket in his face. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean that's really cool though, and and uh, I gotta hand it to that guy. He definitely thinks of things that don't see impossible and somehow is able to make some possible, I know. And that's I mean, that's another thing too. Like he just like he there's a lot a lot you can say about his personality, but some of his problems solving skills make things seem like so it makes it look like you turn to everybody else and be like, why haven't you been doing this this whole time? Too? Like, for example, is the starship the things can start faring people the Moon and beyond. Eventually one of its things is going to be when it comes back down to Earth is to collect space chunk on the way or um the Starlink satellite, SpaceX and Starling satellites, they're all going to be able to autonomously move based on debris tracking data here on Earth, so they'll just be able to move themselves. Um. There's just like just basic stuff that seems like why haven't we been doing this all along? And I mean it's a it's a good question, you know. Uh, it's been a while since you've fanboyd on Elon Musk. I know, I've had some ups and down. Uh. You know, I mentioned earlier that in seventy eight Skylab fell in Western Australia, and uh, what we can't do as humans to say, well, you know fell in the Australian outback. It's very sparsely populated, so it's all good. Probably there are people there, and there are ecosystems there, and it is nature and the planet and it's it is a big deal. Just because it didn't fall on New York City or you know, downtown l A or something doesn't mean it wasn't a problem. It was a problem. And I think in twenty nineteen um NASA said that as much as six of that I S S is going to survive re entry when it eventually comes back down to Earth. So when you have something like the I S S whose ultimate fate is up in the air still literally, um, you you have to plan to deorbit it. Like you can't just leave something that big up there. Uh, it's it would just create too much space debris. And other space stations like the Mirror and China's Tiangong too, I think one and two space labs both were brought down. Um, and some of this stuff is going to survive. Like you said, the space stations, UM, part of that is going to survive. Some of the Mirror survived, some of the Tiangong survived, and you don't want that that re enactment of sky Lab. UM. So they've figured out that if they crash land these things into like a really remote part of the ocean, probably it will be fine. And there's a point in the ocean in the in the South Pacific Ocean called Point Nemo, and UH, NASA and the other space agencies have been landing, crash landing de orbited enormous stuff there for decades. But it wasn't until that UH survey engineer UH named vourier uh Luca Tala nice, thank you is Croatian. I believe UM use this brand new software and triangulated the furthest spot from land in the world. And he said, it's basically Point Nemo, this area that this ace agencies have been using already for decades. They had it basically right on the money. Yeah, So, I mean it's four miles away from the nearest land mass. It's supposedly the one point on Earth further away from any other piece of land. And UH a little fun tidbit about those that exact degree of longitude and latitude is that HP Lovecraft wrote about the Old Ones where the Old Ones live and actually gave coordinates. UM. That we're really really close to these actual calculated coordinates. UM. It's kind of great to think about that. But I also think if you, if you had a good enough flat map of the Earth, you could probably stand back in eyeball what looks like it's furthest away from anything, and you're probably close to Point Nemo, because that's what NASA did. Yeah, that's basically what they did. And so this area Point Nemo, I mean, the fact that it's called Point Nemo makes you think, like, man, they've been crash landing spacecraft in space Station and there for decades. This must just be like the most amazing place to go tour in like a sub. But the thing is, when you crash land something like space Station, the debris field that creates is coming into the ocean could be almost a thousand miles long UM. And it's not like they hit the target every single time, So it's actually like a really huge, enormous tens of thousands, if not millions of square miles wide UM. Area. That's what Point Nemo is. It's kind of a misnomer, actually, yeah, because I think people like, when is it going to start poking. It's a little head above the ocean surface, like a big stack of junk under there. Pretty cool though, it is very cool. And also if you're like, well, what about the fish, do not worry. It turns out the Point Nemo is one of the least bio diverse parts of the ocean around. And get this, Chuck, you want a little cherry on top of our sunday here, I would love that. I always love the cherry. Invisible has not done an episode on Point Nemo. In your face, Mr Mars, that's awesome. There's a recent episode that they did on the movie theater Megaplex History. That's really great, of course. I mean it's invisible. Yeah, you got anything else? I got nothing else? All right? Well, if you want to know more about space junk, to start reading about it. There's a lot of really great articles out there. Uh. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail, I'm gonna call this what the writer called it. My husband is jealous of Josh and Chuck. I hope you guys are both well. I wanted to share with you the Stuff you Should Know is having in unpleasant effect on my marriage. You see, my husband works nights, and while I'm a strong independent person who could hold my own I still like to have a little background noise to soothe me to sleep. Most nights, that means falling asleep to the dulcet tones of maybe how the Black Panther Party worked, or or a gami uh colin folding goodness. Every morning, when my husband gets home, he begrudgingly acknowledges the other men in the room and pauses my app However, we hit a breaking point recently when he returned to find the Stuff You Should Know in complete compendium of mostly interesting things book open on his pillow with me snuggled against it comfortably. Enraged, he tossed it on the floor and we exchanged words. So yeah, you could say my husband is super jelly of Josh and Chuck. All that to say, here's a big thank you for keeping me company and helping me, helping this gal sleep tight every night. Lots of love to my main squeezes ray she hers from Phoenix, All right, ray um. Hopefully that was mostly tongue in cheek. I think so, I hope so. I don't want to be a problem in anybody's marriage, you know, No, just our own, right. Um, Thanks a lot, Ray, and sleep tight as always. Hopefully you guys can work it out. Maybe just get him to read the Stuff you Should Know a book and he'll be like, no, I want the book tonight, And that's what your problem. That's the easiest thing is to convert him exactly. Uh. And we have ways. You can sign up for our brainwashing newsletter if you want some tips, that's right. Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Ray did, or sign up for our brainwashing newsletter, you can send us an email send it off to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Stuff You Should Know

If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD,  
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