Astronomers laud NASA's plan to protect the space environment, but the agency needs to act fast to make a difference.
Astronomers laud NASA's plan to protect the space environment, but the agency needs to act fast to make a difference.NASA is taking environmentalism to orbit. The space agency’s deputy administrator, Pam Melroy, recently unveiled the first phase of NASA’s newwill roll out additional parts of the strategy, which together are designed to ensure that the space around Earth gets cleaned up—and that resources in space are shared equitably and sustainably.
“I’m very happy to see that NASA’s doing this. But I think it’s very important to see whether Congress gives them the budget to actually do anything differently,” says Darren McKnight, senior technical fellow at LeoLabs, a spacecraft and debris-tracking company based in Menlo Park, California.What is true is that any satellite orbiting in a crowded area is at increasing risk of getting smashed by an errant chunk of metal careening into it, and thus becoming trash itself.
The stakes are higher for the International Space Station, which houses astronauts. The station has been threatened several times by orbiting garbage over the past couple years—once by a piece of an old Russian rocket and another time by shrapnel from a Russian anti-satellite missile test that took place in 2021, which delayed a planned NASA spacewalk, since debris could easily penetrate a spacesuit.
Meanwhile, in 2026, the European Space Agency and a private company called Clearspace plan to launch a spacecraft that will use robotic arms to capture a 250-pound rocket part and safely tug it down into the atmosphere, where it and the spacecraft will both safely burn up. According to the U.S. Space Force, the rocket part they’re targeting appears to have itself been hit by smaller debris last summer, further demonstrating the problem and the need for action.
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