Bad things happen when spacecraft aren’t safely decommissioned. In 1978, NASA scientist Donald Kessler considered a scenario in which collisions between low Earth orbiting objects create more and more debris in a domino effect that may one day make orbit – or even spaceflight – impossible. We saw the ramifications of this in 2009 when American and Russian satellites collided and created thousands of small but dangerous pieces of debris, some of which ended up in the International Space Station’s (ISS) flight path two years later.
Luckily, the European Space Agency is investigating means to remove dangerous debris from space. But massive nets and robotic arms aren’t the only ways to get objects out of Earth’s orbit – they can also be instructed to crash into a “spacecraft cemetery” once their service is complete.
Russia has already buried over 190 objects in the cemetery (formally known as the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility), which comprises a patch of Pacific Ocean 2,000 miles north of Antarctica, reports Popular Science. The United States meanwhile has crashed 52 objects there, Europe has crashed eight, Japan six, and SpaceX one.
The goal is to keep these decommissioned objects out of orbit and at a safe distance from any human being. When orbiting objects return to Earth’s atmosphere, they’re often accompanied by immense heat and destruction. By crashing the objects in this isolated region in the Pacific Ocean, NASA and others calculate a less than 0.0001 percent chance that an object or part of its debris will kill a person upon its reentry.
ISS still has more than a decade left in service but will find its final resting place in the space cemetery around 2028. The mission to decommission and return will be tremendous and quite a spectacle, as the 500-ton, football field-sized station comes barreling down to Earth. But we don’t recommend you hang around the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility around that time.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.