Look up! Satellites are falling
A “meteor” spotted in Broome, Western Australia. (Photo: Tasha Thomson)
In the early hours of June 1st, residents of Kimberley in Western Australia captured what appeared to be a “meteor shower” lighting up the skies. Sonic booms were heard all throughout the town, and residents rushed to post their videos and photos of the phenomena on social media.
But what they saw was not a meteor shower. It was a shower of space junk falling from a Chinese Long March 3 rocket.
A similar incident occurred just five days later, on June 6th in Johannesburg, South Africa. At 10:56pm, locals spotted a Russian space rocket crashing to the earth, breaking into several pieces as it plummeted. Sadly, these are not isolated incidents.
A lot of space junk
Ever since mankind’s first venture into space 65 years ago in October of 1957, we’ve shot and abandoned satellites, hardware, exploded motors, and many more, straight into space. Now, it’s all zooming around in our orbit, at speeds of 25,000 km an hour.
According to NASA, there’s more than 27,000 pieces of orbital debris or 9,000 metric tonnes of debris floating around the Earth. And as of now, there are about 2,000 active satellites orbiting the Earth. There are also 3,000 dead ones just littering our immediate orbit.
About 70% of that debris is in low Earth orbit. This part of our orbit is home to missions like the Hubble telescope and the International Space Station, where astronauts from around the world have been studying microgravity for over two decades.
Objects in the lower orbits often re-enter the atmosphere after a few years, and eventually burn up. In other words, they won’t reach the ground. But debris left at higher altitudes of 36,000 kilometers, where things like communications and weather satellites are often placed in geostationary orbits, can continue to zoom around in Earth’s orbit for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Watch out for space garbage!
Over three decades of space exploration have gotten us to this point: we have successfully polluted space. Yay?
Garbage is now regularly falling out of the sky in concerning amounts and velocities, and it’s not going to stop anytime soon. Almost half of the 5,000 active and dead satellites were launched only in the last three years, and over the next decade, those numbers will likely increase exponentially.
Elon Musk’s Starlink, SpaceX’s internet business, has already launched over 2,000 satellites, and has applied to release over 40,000 more. Jeff Bezos has proposed over 7,000 satellites for Project Kuiper.
There are countless more companies who have proposed similar plans. Even if all of these launches don’t push through, the Satellite Industry Association estimates that there could be more than 100,000 commercial spacecrafts in Earth’s orbit by 2030. Worse, even if companies stop launches entirely, the number of objects will continue to multiply, as the debris floating around Earth continue to collide and produce fragments at a higher rate than those that decay.
And this is dangerous for us, even when we’re hundreds of miles away or on the ground. No civilians were hurt in the incidents in Kimberley and Johannesburg, but with the amount of debris floating around in our atmosphere and raining down in false meteor showers, it’s not unlikely that one of these days, a commercial flight or a person walking their dog in South Africa could get hit by a piece of dead satellite.
No one’s doing anything about it, so I guess we’re just going to have to watch our heads from now on?
