Space Junk

To whom it may concern,

Since mankind has reached outer space, our stewardship of Earth’s orbit has closely resembled that of our stewardship of the Earth itself. Basically, we throw everything away with little understanding of the consequences, and now this practice is starting to come back at us, literally. Today, three astronauts in the International Space Station boarded a Russian space capsule as a precaution while a tiny piece of trash nearly collided with the station. There are thousands of pieces of trash floating in Earth’s orbit. While international space agencies try to bring as much of this refuse as they can back down to Earth, most of the garbage is simply jettisoned. The Space Station, space trash, and satellites all compete for orbit space. There is an entire division of NASA that tracks space debris. The worst case scenario is if one piece of trash collides with a satellite, or if one satellite collides with another, which happened earlier this year, and a chain reaction creates a cloud of debris around our planet. It is an unfortunate reminder of our wasteful society. How can your administration help clean up space before something catastrophic happens? Will it take the loss of a military satellite or a nearly $100 billion international project? I am imagining Superman netting together the world’s nuclear weapons and throwing them into the sun. Couldn’t we devise a plan to catch all this debris, tie it to all the dead satellites, and then throw them back into Earth’s orbit and watch it incinerate?

GUNNAR HAND, AICP