Vice President Kamala Harris called for an international moratorium on these space-polluting weapons tests. The problem was so acute that in 2022 U.S. The United States, China and India have all tested anti-satellite missiles, too, by blowing up their own satellites, creating space junk in the process.

The station has been threatened several times by orbiting garbage over the past couple years-once by a piece of an old Russian rocket and another time by shrapnel from a Russian anti-satellite missile test that took place in 2021, which delayed a planned NASA spacewalk, since debris could easily penetrate a spacesuit. The stakes are higher for the International Space Station, which houses astronauts.

If they’d been on a collision course, no one could’ve prevented it. The satellite was dead and so couldn’t possibly have maneuvered out of the way. But the agency is missing the fact that bad things are already happening now-and they need solutions now, too, he says.įor example, on February 28, NASA’s TIMED spacecraft, which studies solar radiation in the upper atmosphere, had a close call with a 32-year-old defunct Russian satellite. NASA’s long-term models are useful, says McKnight, as they show how debris could continue accumulating over decades. Amazon’s Project Kuiper plans to be not far behind. The largest one by far is SpaceX’s Starlink, which could eventually amass more than 40,000 spacecraft in its ranks. The report also points to the recent expansion of artificial constellations in the sky made up of thousands of satellites apiece. It cites the rapidly growing satellite population and the increasingly congested space that is low Earth orbit, as well as all those hazardous bits of space junk, large and small. In the new report, NASA lays out the first part of the sustainability strategy. In such a worst-case-scenario, the space station’s critical modules would be compromised, and any astronaut who couldn’t board a spacecraft and escape would die. Melroy and her colleagues at NASA are particularly concerned about the risks to the International Space Station and the astronauts aboard it-risks that were dramatized by the 2013 movie Gravity, where Sandra Bullock had to flee the orbiting outpost.

What is true is that any satellite orbiting in a crowded area is at increasing risk of getting smashed by an errant chunk of metal careening into it, and thus becoming trash itself. But I think it’s very important to see whether Congress gives them the budget to actually do anything differently,” says Darren McKnight, senior technical fellow at LeoLabs, a spacecraft and debris-tracking company based in Menlo Park, California. “I’m very happy to see that NASA’s doing this. space agency is lagging behind other countries, and it needs more urgency to address this pressing issue of pollution in orbit. Nearly 10,000 functioning satellites encircle the globe, but there are also many, many more defunct spacecraft, derelict rocket bodies, and millions of pieces of other garbage hurtling around our planet at some 17,000 miles per hour.Īstronomers who have sounded the alarm about the increasingly crowded space around Earth have praised the new plan, but many say that the U.S. In fact, the orbital trash problem is arguably the most pressing space issue today. The first phase of NASA’s sustainability strategy focuses on junk in orbit around Earth. Different parts of the agency have been embracing sustainability on their own and using their own approaches-now, NASA is going to make an agency-wide effort, she says. “This was a long time coming,” Melroy says. In the coming months, NASA will roll out additional parts of the strategy, which together are designed to ensure that the space around Earth gets cleaned up-and that resources in space are shared equitably and sustainably. The space agency’s deputy administrator, Pam Melroy, recently unveiled the first phase of NASA’s new Space Sustainability Strategy. NASA is taking environmentalism to orbit.

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