4/23/2005
A New York Times newspaper article is putting NASA officials in the hot seat about what they really knew about the dangers of shuttle debris.
The paper said they have documents from NASA that prove the agency downplayed how dangerous shuttle debris is, to get astronauts back in to space as quickly as possible.
NASA said it runs extensive tests on everything and the shuttle program is now the safest it has ever been.
Up to now more than 180 explosions and 1 collision in space have been recorded. Further explosions and collisions are most likely. The explosions are mainly caused by onboard energy sources, either due to a pressure build-up in propellant tanks, battery explosions, or the ignition of hypergolic fuels. Each explosion creates thousands of small debris objects.
The fact that we have a publication called Orbital Debris Quarterly News speaks volumes.[Two] pieces of rocket hardware have collided high above Earth. The orbital run-in involved a 31-year-old U.S. rocket body and a fragment from a more recently launched Chinese rocket stage.
The collision occurred on January 17 of this year, with the incident happening some 550 miles (885 kilometers) above Earth. That area of low Earth orbit (LEO) has an above-average satellite population density.[...]
The Orbital Debris Quarterly News also reports another accidental collision.
This one took place in late December 1991. In this case, a Russian non-functional navigation satellite, Cosmos 1934, had a run-in with a piece of junk from a sister spacecraft, Cosmos 926.[...]
[The] first recognized fender-bender between cataloged objects from different missions involved an operational spacecraft and a fragment from a launch vehicle upper stage which had suffered a post-mission breakup.
In that event -- which happened on July 24, 1996 -- the French CERISE spacecraft collided with a fragment from the third stage of an Ariane 1 booster, which had exploded ten years earlier.
The problem of space debris is a shameful relic of several hundred explosions and mishaps in outer space. Getting past it is the deadly gamble of every space mission. There is no defense against it. And man made nearly every bit of it in less than four decades.
What will a "permanent cloud of debris" do to incoming solar rays?There are a few pieces of natural space junk orbiting the earth, but more than 99.9%--is man-made. Within 2000 miles of earth some 7 million pounds of space junk is orbiting. [...] In fact, about every seven years since about 1965 the amount of space debris in near-earth orbit has doubled.[...]
[S]cientists recently calculated that the problem is so bad that in the future, near-earth orbit space debris will collide with itself so much and so often that there will be a permanent cloud of debris rather than the millions of discreet items that exist now. In other words, without doing a thing to add more debris to the equation, we've put so much up there the equivalent of a nuclear explosion will occur--actually is occurring--wherein pieces of debris collide with other pieces of debris, creating more pieces of debris, which in turn collide with each other, creating still more debris.
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
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