Space Trash

I’ve been picking at a short story involving space trash (our upper atmosphere is cluttered with debris). It's a timely topic given that three astronauts were recently stranded for over a year after their capsule radiator was struck by a miniscule piece of space junk.
     I’m not the only person fretting about the trash floating overhead.  A company called Privateer is creating 3D images of the junk cluttering Earth’s atmosphere.   Omega (of spacewatch fame) is a recent partner and issued a cool video showing these 3D images.

     Per Wikipedia: “As of November 2022, the US Space Surveillance Network reported 25,857 artificial objects in orbit above the Earth,  including 5,465 operational satellites.  However, these are just the objects large enough to be tracked and in an orbit that makes tracking possible.”
​     NASA has an orbital debris tracking program.  They estimate there are half a million marble-sized objects and one-hundred-million flecks smaller than one millimeter. 
     The speck that incapacitated the Soyuz capsule radiator and stranded those three astronauts was 0.08 millimeters--about the diameter of a human hair. It was able to pierce the spaceship because of the incredibly fast speed at which this debris travels in orbit around the planet.

      I don’t want to live in a garbage dump. I pick up trash while hiking to keep it out of the water supply and as a favor to the forest and fellow hikers.  Once a week, I take our garbage barrel and recycling out to the curb.  Every day I pick up scattered cat toys.
​     Here’s hoping the satellite and space exploration industries learn how to clean up after themselves, before it becomes a more lethal problem.

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