Floating space debris….that travels at 20,000 mph!!

I was listening to National Public Radio this morning on my way to the prayer room when a spot about floating space debris started. I reached forward to turn the volume up figuring, hey this might be interesting.

NASA reports that there are thousands of pieces of space debris orbiting our earth, used rocket parts, old satellites, and random pieces of space craft. I realize that we put stuff in space a lot but c’mon, thousands of chunks of debris?? Seems like a lot to me. But as it turns out, the U.S. military tracks these pieces too, apparently they are really dangerous to space stations. Now this is really getting interesting and I am fully sucked into the story….I reach forward to turn the volume up again. Thousands of floating space chunks, space stations dodging them, and now they are gonna tell me how fast this junk moves, definately worth listening to. I feel like I’m hearing excerpts from Star Wars. I mean, I’m not really a sci-fi geek but this is cool.

Last month an old piece of an outdated Russian satellite collided with something else and ended up sending even more debris floating around the blackness of space. This is why the military tracks this stuff, to watch and to warn space stations of the trajectory and orbit of all this junk, of which there are thousands of pieces. But they only follow pieces that are the size of baseballs or larger because clearly the small stuff isn’t gonna do any serious damage to any craft floating around. Unless it’s traveling at 20,000 mph!!!!! What the?!? Most of this junk travels at least 10-15,000 mph. Some at the aforementioned speed which is entirely too fast to react to, even if you do see it. OK, that’s terrifying.

How would you feel about floating around a space craft with few windows to see what may be speeding toward you, knowing that if something does hit your vessel its going to rip a hole through both sides of your ship, possibly even disembowling you in the process, and that you are powerless to stop it. My hats off to you astronauts, whoever you are. Going up into space is scary enough but to know all that other stuff is enough for me to keep my feet on the ground.

So the story ends with some really smart guy saying, “We should probably be more intentional about cleaning up after ourselves and tracking what we do leave behind.” Or something really inciteful like that.

I’m not sure that I actually learned anything useful by listening to NPR this morning but I obviously did think it cool enough to inform y’all about. I don’t think I’ll ever go into space.