Cleaning Up the Final Frontier

If the world needed a reminder of the sheer amount of stuff swirling around the planet, it received a spectacular one in mid-November. The European Space Agency’s 1.2-ton GOCE satellite, which had studied the earth’s gravitational field, ran out of fuel in low orbit, reentered the earth’s atmosphere, burned up into a fiery mess, and dumped debris across the southern Atlantic just south of the Falkland Islands. The Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee—a global space agency consortium that tracks “space junk”—activated surveillance facilities around the world to monitor the destruction of the bird.

Since the Soviets kicked off the Space Age by launching Sputnik 1 in 1957, mankind has sent more than 7,100 spacecraft of some sort aloft. Along the way, an expanding miasma of refuse—malfunctioning satellites, rocket motor effluents, metal fragments, equipment lost on space walks, and even tiny flecks of paint—has spread in orbit. Computer simulations by NASA portray what looks like a cloud of fruit flies swarming around an apple—only these fruit flies travel at 17,000 miles per hour. And at that speed even a particle can do serious damage to satellites or spacecraft—a scenario dramatized in Alfonso Cuarón’s sci-fi thriller Gravity.