SpaceX and Chinese rocket debris point to growing problem

Hstory remembers October 4, 1957 much better than January 4, 1958 — although in recent weeks the second date has become more important than the first. October 4, 1957 was the day the Soviet Union launched Sputnik – the world’s first satellite – an achievement that heralded the beginning of the space age.

“SOOT SATELLITES ORBITING THE EARTH,” shouted the Los Angeles Times in a banner headline.

“REDS FIRE ‘MOON’ INTO SKY,” the Chicago Daily replied tribune.

There was no such hyperventilation, however, three months later to the day when the small 84 kg (184 lb.) beach ball-sized satellite, which was slowly losing altitude due to atmospheric drag, fell from the sky and burned up like a small fire Meteor in the fiery heat of reentry. This made the world’s first satellite the world’s first space junk to fall. It certainly shouldn’t have been the last.

Since 1957, a vast belt of cosmic junk has accumulated around the Earth — failed satellites, spent rocket parts, bolts, junk, paint chips, and more. According to the European Space Agency (ESA), there are at least 36,500 space debris objects larger than 10 cm (4 inches) in diameter; 1 million objects ranging from 1 cm to 10 cm (0.4 in to 4 in); and a whopping 130 million ranging in size from 1 mm (0.04 in) to 1 cm (0.4 in). All this cosmic debris not only poses a collision risk for manned and unmanned spacecraft, it also threatens the 7.7 billion of us on the planet below.

Just last weekend, on July 30, the 25-ton core stage of a Chinese Long March 5B rocket fell uncontrollably from the sky. Up to 40% of the giant booster survived the heat of reentry, and despite Chinese assurances that the bulk of the metal consumed posed little or no threat to population centers, debris rained down on Borneo.

“No casualties or property damage were reported but debris is near villages and a few hundred yards either way could have been a different story.” tweeted Astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

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The incident was particularly worrying because most national space programs and private sector aerospace companies design their rockets to leave enough maneuvering fuel on board to land at planned locations in the ocean or across vast stretches of uninhabited steppe or desert. The Long March 5B has no such guidance system.

But not only China has been a threat lately. As The guard A 10-foot-tall piece of monolith-like debris that landed on an Australian farm last month has now been reportedly identified as belonging to SpaceX, according to reports. One of the plaques on the piece of scrap examined by Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist at the Australian National University, bore a serial number identifying its provenance.

NASA initially remained silent on the SpaceX incident, with Administrator Bill Nelson reserving his fire for China. “The People’s Republic of China did not share specific trajectory information when its Long March 5B rocket fell back to Earth,” he said in an official statement. “All spacefaring nations should follow established best practices and do their part in sharing this type of information in advance.”

But as news outlets reported this week, NASA has now said that SpaceX has confirmed that the object is “probably the remaining portion of the jettisoned fuselage segment of a dragon Spacecraft used during the return of the Crew 1 mission from the International Space Station last May,” as the New York Times wrote. A statement from the Federal Aviation Administration, reported by CNN, explained that the fuselage segment “typically burns up in the atmosphere.” “In this case, however, it probably stayed in orbit for more than a year and some parts of the fuselage hardware survived to reach Earth.”

Ultimately, nothing is solved with a raised index finger. As national space programs continue to be launched around the world and the private sector increasingly comes into play, the space debris problem will only get worse. This week, think tank Atlantic Council released a report urging the world to develop an international framework for managing in-orbit traffic — reporting and sharing information about launches and re-entry, and developing ways to remove some of the debris from the Orbit to collect and remove.

“The achievement of security, economic and societal goals in the 21st century depends on free and open access to space,” write the report’s authors. “Now is the time to act to protect a future of security and prosperity in space.”

This story originally appeared in TIME Space, our weekly space-themed newsletter. Here you can sign up.

write to Jeffrey Kluger at [email protected].