Pigs in space

That's from a Muppet Show bit. Appropro, I think.

Japan abandoned its troubled mission to Mars on Tuesday after space officials failed in their final effort to put the Nozomi probe back on course to orbit the Red Planet.

The probe, Japan's first interplanetary explorer, had been traveling for five years toward Mars and would have reached the planet next week.

But officials at JAXA, Japan's space agency, said Nozomi was off target and that scientists gave up trying to salvage the mission after an attempt to fire the probe's engines failed because it was short on fuel.

"Our mission to explore Mars is over," JAXA spokesman Junichi Moriuma told The Associated Press. "After today's attempt, almost all of the probe's fuel is gone."

Nozomi — which means "Hope" — was to have circled Mars at an average altitude of about 550 miles to determine whether the planet has a magnetic field.

Nozomi is part of an international fleet of Mars probes.

NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey are orbiting the planet and sending back images. Over the next month or so, the European Space Agency's Mars Express is expected to orbit Mars and release a lander while two NASA landers will also attempt to touch ground.


This is all well and good I suppose - at least in theory.  article

But, in practice, it is an incredible waste of resources when we haven't even begun to clean up the messes we've made here on earth. Nor find a way for people to live peacefully and prosperously. (Now if they're planning to make Mars home for the neo-convicts, the Bush Family Evil Empire, congress, and radical fundamentalists, where do I donate?)

The other problem with this is an outrageous, but typical, by-product of man's industry - trash. We don't know how to get rid of nuclear waste - oh well, just hang on to it, we'll deal with it later (which in all likelihood means when it's too late). We have rusting ships carrying toxic cargo sailing around the oceans denied port in any country. We are burying ourselves in heaps of garbage. And, I wonder how many times you've thought of the trash we abandon in space.

Not only does the stuff present an extremely high-velocity impact danger to any further space launches (it travels at a speed of 17,000+mph), and a high impact danger in instances where it falls back to earth, and there's an expense associated (not only with shields that have to be fitted to spacecraft and satellites and the energy expended in defensive maneuvering, but also with the necessity of tracking all objects bigger than a baseball), the accumulation and entrapment of it in orbit around the earth is creating a nice little shell that interferes with cosmic input, including solar rays.

Hey, maybe it'll counteract the ozone hole!

Or maybe we'll just entomb ourselves.

Check these out.

A Waste of Space
Space Junk - the stuff left behind
Space Debris Update


And who knows what this might present us with...



Of the eighty-nine launches that took place worldwide last year, almost half carried commercial communications satellites. The private sector now puts more payloads into orbit than do NASA and the U.S. and Russian militaries combined. A score of communications companies in the United States and other countries have announced plans that will put hundreds of satellites into orbit over the next decade. Many will fly in relatively low orbits within a few hundred miles above where the space station will orbit, so that they can relay signals coming from hand-held phones.

None of these companies is under any obligation to limit orbital debris...

As more objects go into orbit, spacecraft will begin colliding with -- and being shattered by -- debris. Furthermore, collisions beget more collisions. This process is known as collisional cascading, or the Kessler effect, after Donald Kessler, recently retired from his post as the head of the debris program at NASA. In the 1970s Kessler showed mathematically that once a certain amount of mass, known as the critical mass, is put into a particular orbit, collisional cascading begins even if no more objects are launched into that orbit. Originally dismissed as a mathematical fantasy, Kessler's prediction is on the verge of coming true. In the most popular orbits, Kessler says, "if we're not at the critical mass, we're pretty close to it."  article

Maybe this...

"This is only a projection," Rossi says, but if we keep putting objects into orbit as we have been, "operations will not be possible anymore."

Maybe we'll create our own barrier to keep us from setting up shop on some other unsuspecting planet.

A hundred years from now, when our descendants want to put satellites into orbits teeming with debris, they will wonder what we could have been thinking. The simple answer is we weren't thinking at all.

Bingo.