Going "Green" in Space Too

It seems that pretty much any efforts at 'cleaning up' or 'going green' are met with resistance these days. Whether it's because people believe that the goals are too high to ever achieve or because they feel the costs outweigh the potential savings, there is seemingly no way to win the debate. And now, the latest entrant into this category, though it's more closely related to space than earth-bound clean up efforts, is the talk this week of the U.S. Navy's plan of shooting down a spy satellite that will potentially fall out of orbit and crash into the world with a deadly payload of hydrazine fuel still on board.

Now the politicos will note that this whole debate on the issue is controversial because last year when the Chinese did the same thing to one of their errant weather satellites, the U.S. and everyone else was up in arms that it was a sham meant to cover up China's testing of a new anti-satellite missile system. Now what's good for the goose is good for the gander and many skeptics out there are claiming that the U.S. is using this spy satellite as an excuse to do the same thing. Now I'm not all that concerned with what is or isn't the reason behind all these things. I could care less if this was an actual test for anti-satellite weapons systems. If it is then there are people earning a lot more money than I am making the decision and at this point there is very little you or I can do about it. What concerns me more is the revelation that this incident will likely bring about for a lot of people and that's the question of all the 'junk' hanging in orbit above our planet.

Now most pictures in space show this serene and empty view of the Earth and spacecraft hovering over the planet with nothing else in sight. The truth is that if you were to go a few hundred more miles out then you'll find that there is a ton of stuff in orbit. Remember all the satellites delivering you daily weather news. The ones that spotted Hurricane Katrina before it hit land? The one that allows you to call your Aunt in France? The one that transmits your credit card information so you can purchase that pashmina from the store in Kashmir? The one that was used to transmit television images from one site to another? And there are literally thousands and thousands more. Though for the most part most of these eventually fall back to earth and burn up in the atmosphere, a lot of this stuff doesn't. Back in the 1970's this was clearly illustrated when Skylab, America's first space station, dropped from orbit due to miscalculations as to how 'high' the station was. It eventually came down and crashed in the Pacific and parts of northern Australia. Now thankfully no one was killed but there was uncertainty for a time as to what could happen.

These days is no different. There are so many things orbitting or sitting above our planet that there's the potential for some deadly results. Forget scenarios of meteors crashing into Earth like in "Armageddon" or "Deep Impact". I'm worried about that old MTV satellite that could come crashing down on us one day simply because we forgot it's up there and thus don't remember that its orbit is constantly decaying. Now what does that mean for the orbit to decay? Well, put quite simply, any object in orbit around the planet is still under some amount of influence of Earth's gravity even way out in space. If you see astronauts in the shuttle, though they are weightless, the still tend to eventually fall towards the Earth because there is still some gravity acting upon them. Satellites, even the ones way out there, are under the same influence and eventually, if the satellite or other object is not kept at a certain point, the gravity pulls the object back home and therein is what I term the "Chicken Little" problem. In other words, the sky is falling! The sky is falling!

While I have no doubt that there is a lot of idea about what all is up in orbit above us, it's difficult to track how many things are actually out there. I mean we are by no means the only ones launching stuff up there. Pretty much the entire world has launched something or the other into orbit at one time or another and so it's literally like a parking lot up there. The accompanying image is only a rendering of some of what is up there in 'low' Earth orbit. In relative terms that's only a few thousand miles away. There are more in higher orbits that make any moves up there potentially dangerous ones. Well, one thing is for certain in all this, any alien species wondering whether our planet is inhabited or not will know from the fact that we have so much junk up there that there's someone down here. Maybe that's why we haven't had real signs of aliens, they are getting lost in all that junk.