By W. L. Rathje

On June 17 this year, US Air Force trackers of "space junk" alerted NASA that a spent Russian booster rocket was headed straight for the International Space Station (ISS). By sheer luck alone, the huge relic missed blowing the ISS to smithereens by only 5 miles.

My first thoughts were, "How in tune with recent human history it is that our garbage should come back to haunt us." Then I couldn't help but dream of an exo-garbology---meaning the study of space junk created by "intelligent life" (and I use "intelligent" with some misgivings)---to help humans learn from past garbage mistakes.

But are earthlings conducting the first exo-garbology? Perhaps not. As recently as August 1996, a NASA team examined a potato-size chunk of Mars. They tentatively concluded that it might contain signs of life. While the evidence was only a few specks that resembled fossilized microbes, the announcement led bookmakers in London to raise the odds of "intelligent life" somewhere in our universe.

If there are currently exo-garbologists on other planets, I wonder what they make of our first ventures into their realm. As any earthling knows, what most defines our humanness is our indefatigable urge to create garbage---the bounty from which archaeologists learn about our life ways. Consider what an Indiana Jones from another planet would know about us.

Appropriately, the Earth is surrounded by orbital flotsam. But unlike the hordes of miniature moons neatly aligned into rings around Jupiter and Saturn, according to Nicholas Johnson (Scientific American, 1998), Earth's hangers-on "resemble angry bees around a beehive, seeming to move randomly in all directions." When you look at their numbers, you can almost hear them buzz.

First, there are about 10,000 "resident space objects"-only 5% of which were functioning spacecraft in 1997. Spent artifacts include some 1,500 empty upper-stage rockets, myriad explosive bolts leftover after separation from their payload, and lens caps jettisoned from sensitive instruments. Then there is "real garbage" garbage. During its first decade in orbit, for example, more than 200 objects drifted away from the MIR Space Station, most appropriately hooded in garbage bags.

But the greatest source of significant-size space stuff is approximately 150 satellites that have blown up or fallen apart, either deliberately or accidentally, leaving a trail of 7,000 fragments large enough (over 10 cm) to be trackable from Earth.

To make matters messier, NASA estimates there are another 400,000 space artifacts too small for us to detect, as well as about 1 million small flakes of paint and other tiny spots of debris---some of it surprising. In 1990, the surface of a recovered satellite that had been in orbit for six years was found to be speckled with urine and fecal material---another discard from Russian and American space missions.

To some of us on Earth, this gaggle of space junk might seem to be a laughing matter---that is, unless you were in the outback of Australia when what was left of 100 tons of the Skylab satellite survived re-entry into the atmosphere and crashed there in 1979. Or unless you imagine what would have happened if the rocket shell had hit or even just grazed the space station! Then you'd know why understanding the causes and trajectories of space junk are important to humanity's future in space. That is the reason the air force and NASA have their own brand of exo-garbologists tracking and modeling the future of our space orphans.

By now, extraterrestrial exo-garbologists must have some theories about why we continually shoot ourselves in the foot with our castoffs. Perhaps they have reasoned that this kind of faux pas occurs because of one of the most consistent human-artifact relationships: Whenever we humans try something new, we throw everything material we can at it to make our attempt successful. The result is a tremendous accumulation of leftover junk.

In fact, frontiers---whether physical or theoretical---are junk magnets of immense proportions. That's because we tend to worry only about the success of our immediate goal---settling an "untamed" land, "conquering" Mt. Everest or Mt. McKinley, "harnessing" nuclear power as an energy source---and not about cleaning up the mess we leave behind.

American pioneers abandoned so much of what they originally loaded onto their wagons that professional scavengers regularly followed the trails West to glean the leavings. Organizations friendly to the environments of both Mt. Everest and Mt. McKinley have recently become concerned about oxygen bottles, climbing equipment, and camping gear---left behind in massive fields of eyesores. And who can forget our nuclear-waste dilemma: tons of radioactive material without any disposal plan in place. As a result, today many of the storage containers of older wastes are too degraded to move safely even if there were a place to put them.

Space exploration has obviously been no different.

So now earthlings are stuck with two kinds of nonfunctioning space artifacts: those in the heavens and those used on or brought back to Earth.

Those on Earth are not such a problem. The main reason is that most, if not all, humans seem to have an uncontrollable desire to collect, and for decades people have been acquiring space memorabilia. The intensity of private collectors is documented by two massive Sotheby's auctions, held in 1993 and 1996, of Russian space artifacts, much of them "looted" from the former Soviet Union. But even the monetary value of space artifacts pales beside the educational and emotional potential of items that have been out in space and come back.

In the US, besides the government's Smithsonian and various NASA museums, there are other public contenders for these treasures, such as the Cosmosphere in the city of Hutchinson, KS. Such organizations save never-used (but deteriorating) backup spacecraft from neglect and landfills.

Most distressing about the junk still in space is how it affects our space future. Sadly, because of orbit speeds of 20,000 ft./sec., both mammoth and miniscule space junk are currently the most serious threat to the safety of the ISS and its future occupants, even with the potential of new "bumpers," which use several layers to shatter and slow any projectile.

If we look at all Earth-generated debris in space as a great metaphor for the profligate discard practices of humanity, we might find a couple of lessons:

Lesson 1: Whether designing a new clamshell for burgers or the next flight to Mars, it is only responsible to plan for disposal during invention.

Lesson 2: There will be gold out there for whomever figures out how to recapture, renovate, reuse, and recycle the garbage we have already wrought.

And the reason to clean up our space might be more than astronaut safety and money. One vision of the form that intelligent life on other planets might take was in the 1997 movie Independence Day. The movie's aliens were mad as hell at the human race. What the film really didn't explain was the source of the grudge against earthlings. After reviewing how much garbage we've left in space, I think I know the answer.

MSW

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