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Economist 導讀 Leaders 精選故事 Decluttering low-Earth orbit, It’s time to tidy up space

https://youtu.be/ZhoSZTZ_Vsg

Decluttering low-Earth orbit.

It’s time to tidy up space.

And also to create rules to stop it getting messy again.

整理低地球軌道。

現在該整理外太空間了。

並訂下規則以防止太空變成垃圾場。

Decluttering low-Earth orbit.

It’s time to tidy up space.

And also to create rules to stop it getting messy again.

Leaders.

Everybody’s business, an old saw has it, is nobody’s business. And that is a good description of the business of keeping outer space clean and tidy.

Yet the part of space nearest Earth, known technically as low-Earth orbit, is getting cluttered. Some of the objects up there are working satellites. Some are satellites that have stopped working.

Some are stages of the rockets which put those satellites into orbit. And a lot are debris left over from explosions and collisions between larger objects.

The risk of such collisions is increasing, for two reasons. First, the number of satellites being launched is rising.

Second, collisions themselves beget collisions. The fragments they create add to the number of orbiting objects.

At the moment, more than 20,000 such objects are being tracked, but there may be as many as 1m bigger than 1cm across.

In the long term, this accumulation of junk may lead to a chain reaction, known as Kessler syndrome, that would make some low-Earth orbits unusable.

Even in the short term it puts lots of expensive hardware at risk.

So plans are being laid to send up special craft to “deorbit” redundant satellites and rocket stages.

Given the current situation, this is a good, if expensive, idea. But a better one for the future would be to build deorbiting into the life-cycles of satellites and rocket stages from the beginning.