Air/Spacecraft

The U.S. is in a pickle. If the amount of space junk keeps increasing in orbit, it may get to the point that we will not be able to launch anything using our current technology, because of collisions. I thought hard about this fact and began to wonder why we have allowed things to get to this point? Things are so bad up there that it is being feared that the Kessler Syndrome will take effect. In 1978 a U.S. scientist named Donald J. Kessler proposed that the volume of space in low Earth orbit would have so many collisions by space debris that they would create collisions with other debris and this would just continue, making space launches impossible. One of the problems is speed. The shuttle has been damaged from things like tiny paint chips. A paint chip on Earth doesn't pose much of a collision hazard if it hits something, but accelerate that chip to about 25,000 miles per hour and we have a whole different ball game. Imagine this chip traveling at 25,000 miles per hour hitting an object that is also going at a great rate of speed. We have to add together the two rates of speed and we might get something like a collision at 40,000 or 50,000 miles per hour between two objects.

Debris In Low Earth Orbit
Photo Source: NASA

So why haven't we attempted to clean this mess up by maybe blasting some of this stuff with lasers? There are many different plans on the drawing board for removing this stuff, but admittedly they are all expensive and international space law prevents us from touching any other country's satellites, even if they are non operational. Add to this the fact that some of this stuff is secret and one nation doesn't want another nation to know what they have. I guess this is especially true of old American satellites that might have been put up as spy satellites. Even though the technology might be old by now, it still might be ahead of some of the space faring nations of the world. If a country like Japan sent up ships to clear out the low Earth orbit area, would the U.S. cry foul and demand that they stop on the threat of war? What if a country like Iran becomes a space power, would they launch a holy war against anyone who touched one of their satellites, even if it was obsolete and crashing into other satellites?

The area of space above the earth is surrounded by touchy legal problems. The only way it can ever be sorted out is by treaty. I don't imagine that even the U.N. could clean up the thorny legal problems about cleaning up space.

Orbital Debris To Over 37000 km
Photo Source: NASA

Let's get back to the question, is there any advantage to a country to allow the low Earth orbit area to become so full of junk that nothing could be launched? The answer is a resounding YES for a couple of reasons. The very first one that comes to mind, is that countries that do not have the level of space technology that we have, could render our technology useless. For example spy satellites don't last forever and if they get destroyed and we can't replace them, we become as blind as a third world country that doesn't have space systems. The U.S. military depends on satellites for spying and communication and the loss of this ability probably scares our military more than anything else. I know that we have backup systems that can be used, but once a military is used to getting so much data and suddenly it is limited, it puts them in an unfamiliar position and this could be a disadvantage.

The second reason that some country might want low Earth orbit so full of junk as to render launches impossible, is if they had some way of penetrating this stuff that no one else has. This would be such a great advantage to the power with an effective shield that they would virtually own space. Even if another country could eventually figure out a way to also create a shield, it might be too late. So a country with shield technology and the ability to track the large stuff so as not to get hit by it, might love to see space closed off to everyone else.

View Of Debris Over North Pole
Photo Source: NASA

Let talk about shield technology. Any shield technology that we could come up with now, would only protect against small stuff. Even a bolt has so much kinetic energy when it is traveling at orbital speeds that it would be very hard to protect against. Scientists in Britain have admitted that they have now figured out how to contain a space ship in a mini-magnetosphere. They admit that this will protect a speeding space ship from high energy solar particles. They are calling this invention a deflector shield. Here is the amazing part of the entire thing. The device that powers the shield is no bigger than a desk and uses no more electricity than an electric kettle. Could this be the start of something far more powerful?

I do not know the extent of the power of this shield, but I have to imagine that it could not stop space debris that was much larger than a solar particle. This is a beginning however and just might lead to the development of higher powered shields. When I first heard about this project, I couldn't help but wonder if a Tesla coil was involved. A Tesla coil is a device that steps up the voltage to a huge amount. Tesla was the electrical genius who developed AC current among other things. Here is the bottom line, if we could produce a plasma shield hot enough to incinerate particles of debris at least the size of a bolt, we could probably still launch, even if all that debris was up there. It might be possible using nuclear power as the power source, to get enough power to generate this type of shield some day. Wouldn't that be something? It would be like a diver jumping into a pool and just parting the water as he travels through it.

Will this ever become a reality? If we stay out of wars and get the economy back on track, we just might do it. It might even happen by mistake, when scientists are looking at other things. One never knows when something like that might happen. If we accomplish this, would we be tempted to let the debris pile up to keep other nations out of space? I would hope that we would work together with the nations of the world to use this technology to begin to explore the solar system without fear of some grain of sand sized particle piercing our ship. I would also hope that we all get together and clear up the mess in orbit around our home.

By the way, it is being said that with this shield, we might be able to use plastic spaceships made from garbage bags.