When word dropped that ex-NASA scientist Don Kessler was coming to town, the inner astronomy nerdling in me kinda sorta totally flipped out. Fellow nerdling and Nexus contributing writer Ryan Brezzi interviewed Kessler (read his story here), but when Kessler called the office one day looking for Brezzi, I did what anyone who grew up owning a solar system T-shirt would do: I asked him a few quick questions while I had him on the phone.
Kessler brought the issue of space junk to the world’s attention back in the ’70s. Apparently, people didn’t listen like they should have. Now he’s using the movie Space Junk, which he was an adviser for, to try again to remind us that litter is litter, regardless of where it is. And there’s a whole lot of it up there.
What are some of the important things that people should know about space junk?
We’ve established an international organization [Inter-agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, IADC] and there’s international agreement on a lot of things that we needed to do and have done, we’ve developed measurements programs so that we know what we’re doing. Our model had proven to be extremely accurate, so we understand that the environment has passed over a tipping point such that we’re going to have to recover some things that are already in orbit in order to keep the debris environment from growing, and there’s international agreement upon that.
It seems like the average person walking down the road probably doesn’t realize this is all going on.
That’s true. And that’s a surprise, that very few people have even heard of the issue. It’s sort of similar to the climate change issue in the sense that it’s a slow-moving thing, it has a tipping point, it requires international cooperation, and it’s not going to affect everybody immediately, but the sooner you start trying to do something about it, the cheaper it’s going to be and the more effective it’s going to be.
So how big of an issue is it? Do you lay awake at night and think, ‘Holy cow, this is…’
No (laughs). It’s not going to be a doomsday thing that’s going to happen immediately. The movie Gravity illustrates that it might be, and under certain circumstances, if you make the wrong decision… we’ve almost started down that path in the past with the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Star Wars program, that would have put a lot of satellites in orbit, and that would have been very bad. Also, we were going to build solar power stations in orbit, that would have been very bad. You could have very easily done something like the movie Gravity illustrates did happen in that story, in terms of how quickly things could cascade out of control. So you do need a plan.
Right. And has that been the problem, we started this without a plan?
That’s exactly right. And we still don’t have one (laughs). We have put together some guidelines, like we have a 25-year rule of whatever you put in space you should bring it out within 25 years; we keep things from exploding by saying you need to dump the excess fuel so they don’t explode in orbit, and in the past those were the main sources of our debris. In the future, it’s going to be random collisions, and we’ve already passed over the tipping point, so if you don’t add any more things to space the random collisions will create debris faster than it can be cleaned out naturally. So it will slowly grow, it’s a slow process, as long as we don’t do anything dumb. So far, because of the international agreement, the chances of doing anything dumb is pretty remote. Except when you think of what China did with their anti-satellite disc, which, they knew better. But their military didn’t. The scientific community knew better, but the military did not.
So, moving ahead, what do we need to do?
Come up with a plan and some money to start doing this. Of course, right now the US is really kind of handicapped. Places like Japan and the European Space Agency are taking some leadership roles. Incidentally, Canada is a member of the IADC, too.