‘Please take your rubbish home with you’: The problem of space debris

There is a real danger that our own activity is about to get the better of us and that low-Earth orbit will be lost to mankind – at least for a generation, writes Steven Cutts

Not satisfied with sullying the planet, we are now littering space with our waste (Getty/iStock)

In recent years there has been an increasing clamour of voices expressing concern about the state of our environment here on Earth. The quest for growth is stretching our planet to the limit and at the rate we’re going, there’ll be nothing left soon. Less well publicised is the impact we’ve already had on the world above our heads. Having ruined our own terrestrial environment, we are now proceeding to contaminate outer space in much the same way.

Outer space is a big place. The universe surely is too big to fail. It extends forever in all directions and for this and other reasons it’s hard to imagine how we could possibly do any harm there. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. As far as the first few hundred miles go, there is now a real danger that our own activity is about to get the better of us and that low-Earth orbit will be lost to mankind – at least for a generation.

The vast majority of space launches have sent people and equipment just 200-300 miles above the Earth and there are now thousands of satellites in orbit. Very few of these satellites orbit in a perfect circle, most of them progress through a gentle ellipse until something brings them down. There’s a second category of satellites that loiter in geostationary orbit and these are about 35,000km out. Their trajectory follows a perfect circle and from the point of view of an observer here on Earth, they seem to occupy a fixed point in the sky. Equipment that goes any higher than this is something of a rarity and is – for the most part – scientific probes on their way to other planets. These represent only a very small proportion of space launches to date and are unlikely to cause any trouble.