Thousands of tiny satellites are about

to go into space and possibly ruin it

forever

Man-made objects designed to explore the universe are now

challenges for modern spaceflight. (European Space Agency)

By Avi Selk April 21

Halfway through the European Space Agency's new film, we're at

the part where if this were some happy space documentary
from yesteryear Carl Sagan might be giving us a tour
of a distant galaxy.

But it's 2017, Sagan is dead, and this is a film about space trash.
So six minutes in, we're stuck a mere 800 miles above Earth,
watching a wasp swarm of defunct satellites whip around the
globe to a frenetic soundtrack that sounds like the end of The
Dark Knight.

It's a dramatic simulation of what low Earth orbit looks like today.
You can even watch it in 3-D. Because the European Space
Agency really, really wants you to pay attention to the space
debris problem.
The problem is about to get worse, experts say, as cheap, tiny
satellites are shot through the stratosphere in unprecedented
numbers.

Worst-case scenario: a massive, unstoppable, chain-reaction

traffic wreck above our heads. So much for escaping Earth
to distant galaxies.

The short film Space Debris: A Journey to Earth was screened

this week in Germany at the world's largest annual gathering of
space-debris experts.

The news from space was not great.

Hundreds of thousands of bits of space junk are orbiting

Earth, according to NASA. These include tiny paint flecks that can
take out a space shuttle window, and some 2,000 satellite shards
left by a collision of Russian and American satellites several years
ago.
In Germany, the audience was shown a slide from another
depressing space film, Gravity. The part where the International
Space Station is destroyed in an avalanche of space trash.

There were many mistakes in that movie; I will not go through

that, ESA Director General Jan Woerner said. But the effect, as
such, is a very serious one.

Woerner cut to video from the real International Space Station,

which has not yet been destroyed.
Bobbing around in zero gravity, astronaut Thomas Pesquet
described what the space station crew has to do when a piece of
debris whizzes past: Climb into an escape shuttle, wait and hope.

This happened four times, Pesquet said. In my own interests,

let me wish you a successful conference.
(European Space Agency)

Then it was on to a keynote speech from retired NASA scientist

Donald Kessler, known for coming up with an apocalyptic space-
crash theory called the Kessler syndrome or orbital
Nagasaki, as a researcher once described it to The Washington
Post.

Basically: A thing hits another thing at 25,000 mph or so. Those

things then explode into more things, which hit yet more things,
initiating a catastrophic chain reaction of collisions that makes low
Earth orbit totally unusable.
Kessler predicted this in the 1970s, when space had fewer things
in it. At this week's conference, he previewed a new study he
worked on that found a statistically meaningful number of
satellites that have been damaged by debris.

[Space trash is a big problem. These economists have a solution.]

And an ESA official described a recent study finding that a

particularly crowded region of space has already become
unstable, which he worried could foretell Kessler's doomsday
scenario.
The bad news didn't stop there.

As satellites get smaller and cheaper, more and more of them are
going into orbit to potentially smash into each other.

In February, the New York Times reported, India launched 104 tiny
satellites into space from a single rocket.

It was a world record, though one not likely to stand for long.
In all of human history, ESA's debris chief said at the
conference, about 7,000 spacecraft have left Earth. He pulled up
a slide of 12,000 new satellites set to go up soon, announced by
companies such as Samsung and SpaceX.

Many of these like the batch India sent into space are nano-
satellites: tiny, motorless machines that promise to revolutionize
communications.

They're simple enough to make that grade school students in

Arlington, Va., put one together for a class project. Once in orbit,
they fan out into wide constellations, outperforming their bulkier
ancestors.
[Why investors are following Musk, Bezos in betting on the stars]

But these tiny satellites have big problems, according to

experts at the conference. There will be lots of them, for one
thing. And since they can't navigate, they'll keep careening
through space long after they've stopped working and are thus
more likely to collide with other things.

Hugh Lewis, an aerospace researcher with the University of

Southampton, spoke at the conference about a dire computer
model his team ran. They simulated the effects of 270 nano-
satellites launched into space each year for 50 years a realistic
assumption, Lewis said, as more than 100 a year are already
going up.

He projected the results of the simulation onto the wall; the

chance of space collisions more than doubled with the tiny
satellites in play.

Lewis noted that mega-constellations of satellites aren't

necessarily bad. He said they have the potential to provide
affordable communications to the half of the world that lacks such
technology.

But other experts at the conference noted that

voluntary guidelines to mitigate space debris (bring your dead
satellite out of orbit within 25 years, for example) often go
ignored.

No one has found an ideal solution for cleaning up the junk thats
already there, Rachel Feltman wrote for The Post last year.

And if the next Space Age only adds more of it, low Earth orbit
could resemble something even worse than a dramatically
scored wasp swarm by the time the ESA makes a sequel to its
space-trash film.
Astronaut Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency
photographed the Rocky Mountains from the International Space
Station in January. (Thomas Pesquet/AFP/Getty Images)
Posted by Thavam