Member-only story
Get Ready for the “Kessler Syndrome” to Wreck Outer Space
Space junk in orbit is looking to become our next ecological mess
Back in 1978, the astrophysicist Donald Kessler made an alarming prediction: Space junk could wreck our ability to keep satellites aloft.
In a fascinating paper, Kessler noted that “low earth orbit” — a region between 99 miles and 1,200 miles up — was getting pretty crowded. In 1978 there were already 3,866 objects being tracked in space. That included satellites used by scientists (say, to monitor weather) or spy agencies. It also included a lot of debris: Every time a rocket launches a satellite into orbit, it tends to leave stray bits of material.
The thing is, when objects are zooming through space about 2 km/s, even something as tiny as a chip of paint can smash through glass or steel. Pieces of debris become bullets.
What Kessler predicted is that sooner or later, objects in low-earth orbit would start colliding, and produce chain effects, like billiard balls colliding on a crowded pool table. If a piece of debris hit a satellite, it would produce more debris, which would to increase the risk of other collisions … and so on, and so on. At some point, you could reach a tipping point. There’d be so many chunks of debris that collisions would be inevitable, leaving low-earth orbit a junkyard where no satellites could survive.
Remember the scene in Wall-E where they blast off Earth, and the planet is utterly ringed with crap? That’s what Kessler worried about. Except in our situation the pieces of junk could be quite small — billions of objects the size of grains of sand, which is actually a lot harder to deal with, because you can’t see it coming.
In essence, Kessler predicted we could create an artificial asteroid belt of junk:
The result would be an exponential increase in the number of objects with time, creating a belt of debris around the earth. This process of mutual collisions is thought to have been responsible for creating most of the astroids from larger planetlike bodies.
