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Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty two, the United States detonated a one

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Speaker 1: point four megaton hydrogen bomb four hundred kilometers above the

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Speaker 1: surface of the Earth. This was part of a project

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Speaker 1: called Operation fish Bowl. Not Surprisingly, it created a huge

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Speaker 1: explosion which lit up the sky and disrupted radio transmissions.

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Speaker 1: It also knocked out street lights in Hawaii, which may

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Speaker 1: have worried partygoers who, according to Smithsonian magazine, were gathering

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Speaker 1: on hotel rooftops for h bomb explosion viewing parties. It

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Speaker 1: also messed up six different satellites, whour belonged to Americans,

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Speaker 1: one was Russian, and it also messed up the very

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Speaker 1: first British satellite. The Soviet Union was conducting similar tests

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Speaker 1: of nuclear weapons in space at the same time. This

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Speaker 1: didn't bode well for the future of satellites in space.

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Speaker 1: This amazing new technology of satellites held a lot of promise,

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Speaker 1: but who would want to invest in it? If the

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Speaker 1: United States and the Soviet Union kept making satellites inoperable

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Speaker 1: with nuclear weapons tests in space, well lucky for all

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Speaker 1: of us. In nineteen sixty three, both nations agreed to

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Speaker 1: stop screwing up space for the rest of us and

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Speaker 1: signed the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which banned the

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Speaker 1: test of nuclear weapons in some places, including space. In

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Speaker 1: this year, you also get a UN resolution saying weapons

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Speaker 1: of mass destruction can't be orbited in space. And you

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Speaker 1: get a United Nations Outer Space Treaty which comes into

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Speaker 1: force in nineteen sixty seven, which reiterated all of these

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Speaker 1: points for other nations as well.

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Speaker 2: New Now satellites are safe, right, well, probably well, space

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Speaker 2: is really vast. We've put a lot of stuff in

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Speaker 2: orbit around Earth, and the pace at which we're sending

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Speaker 2: stuff up is ever increasing as the cost of sending

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Speaker 2: that stuff up drops.

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Speaker 1: Could it get too crowded up there? Could some of

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Speaker 1: the space litter we've left behind smash into the stuff

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Speaker 1: we're still trying to use. I'd be really bummed out

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Speaker 1: if I couldn't watch cat videos using my Starlink satellite

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Speaker 1: provided internet. To answer some of these questions about the

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Speaker 1: risks of stuff bumping into each other in space, we're

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Speaker 1: interviewing doctor Jonathan McDowell, who has been tracking objects sent

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Speaker 1: to space since nineteen sixty one, when the Soviet Union

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Speaker 1: sent up Sputnick, the first ever satellite in space. Welcome

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Speaker 1: to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

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Speaker 3: Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I feel

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Speaker 3: like my house is constantly filling up with junk.

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Speaker 1: I'm Kelly Winer Smith. I'm a parasitologist and I have

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Speaker 1: felt that way since I married Zach. And the rate

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Speaker 1: at which the junk has been increasing has exponentiated since

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Speaker 1: we had children. So we might have a Kessler syndrome

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Speaker 1: situation happening in our house in the near future.

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Speaker 3: That's only if your children collide with each other and

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Speaker 3: make more children or something.

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Speaker 1: The biologist in me is not okay with that metaphor.

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Speaker 3: No, that was bad. So which of you is the

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Speaker 3: cleaner upper or are you both contributing to the junk?

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Speaker 1: I am the cleaner upper. I am also the less

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Speaker 1: bringer stuffer into the houser. I don't like to buy

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Speaker 1: a lot of new stuff, but that's not my husband's

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Speaker 1: attitude about stuff. What about in your family.

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Speaker 3: I'm the thrower away. I'm the person constantly carding out

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Speaker 3: bags of junk in the house, whereas my wife and

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Speaker 3: daughter like going thrift store shopping and so they're bringing

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Speaker 3: stuff in, and then I'm like taking trips to the

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Speaker 3: thrift store. When I take a trip to the thrift store,

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Speaker 3: for example, it's a negative impact on our house, and

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Speaker 3: they have the opposite effects. So we have like a

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Speaker 3: thrift circuit going.

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Speaker 4: Man.

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Speaker 1: So I've gotten myself in trouble for being the person

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Speaker 1: who throws stuff out in the house because my daughter

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Speaker 1: will not let go of things, and Zach doesn't want

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Speaker 1: to let go of things either, and I got in

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Speaker 1: trouble once. I was like, well, if I just throw

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Speaker 1: it out, they won't notice. But then they notice, And

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Speaker 1: so for a while I moved everything to a storage unit.

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Speaker 1: You might be noticing it's a whole thing, Yes, the

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Speaker 1: whole thing.

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Speaker 3: I see. See, you've moved to the multi stage throwout techniques.

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Speaker 3: I'm gonna put it over here, and then when nobody notices,

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Speaker 3: I'll move it over there, and then eventually I get

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Speaker 3: to throw it away.

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Speaker 1: And that's why I have a whole farm. I've got

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Speaker 1: lots of spots to squirrel their junk away. Oh and

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Speaker 1: I just remembered that Zach has been listening to the podcast,

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Speaker 1: which is so nice of him. Don't check the tenant house.

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Speaker 3: Well. The danger of moving on to a farm in

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Speaker 3: a big house is the more space you have, the

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Speaker 3: more junk you get. I feel like we have a

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Speaker 3: constant density of junk, and if we lived in a

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Speaker 3: smaller space, we would have less stuff.

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Speaker 1: The belief has been that because we have all of

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Speaker 1: this space, we can get more stuff. But I don't

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Speaker 1: want the junk outside. I don't want more stuff. I

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Speaker 1: don't want more stuff.

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Speaker 3: Yeah. Space is more valuable than almost any stuff. Whenever

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Speaker 3: we throw something away, I'm like, Ah, look at all

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Speaker 3: that empty space. It's wonderful.

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Speaker 2: Yes, right, isn't it nice?

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Speaker 1: So when when you come home with like a bag

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Speaker 1: in your hand and to just be able to like

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Speaker 1: put it on the counter because there's clear space on

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Speaker 1: the counter and not like have to elbow cups out

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Speaker 1: of the way.

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Speaker 3: Ah, agree with you? All right?

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Speaker 1: All right, team clean over here.

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Speaker 3: And if we were in charge of the atmosphere around Earth,

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Speaker 3: maybe you and I we keep it pretty clean.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, But the people that we keep interacting with would

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Speaker 1: be like, well, there's a lot of space, so we're

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Speaker 1: just gonna move it somewhere else, you know, And then

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Speaker 1: the graveyard orbit would get all crowded. And I don't know,

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Speaker 1: I'm a pessimist, Daniel.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, Zach and Katrina would fill the universe with junk.

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Speaker 1: There's there's room. Don't worry. Buy more books, buy more books. Well,

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Speaker 1: we don't have to keep them. We're not going to

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Speaker 1: read them again. No, I can't let go of a book.

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Speaker 1: Books gotta stay forever.

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Speaker 3: Zach, you can keep all your books in orbit near Pluto.

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Speaker 3: M I love you, And today on the podcast, we're

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Speaker 3: going to be talking about junk and space junk with

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Speaker 3: somebody who has spent their whole career thinking and tracking

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Speaker 3: bits of garbage in space.

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Speaker 1: I have loved interacting with Jonathan McDowell on Twitter. When

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Speaker 1: we were writing A City on Mars. He was my

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Speaker 1: go to person where I was like the needles from

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Speaker 1: Project west Ford, are they still in space? Jonathan, the

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Speaker 1: glove that got lost during the EVA number five hundred

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Speaker 1: and forty three, is that still in space? He knows

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Speaker 1: the answer to all of these questions. He is the guy.

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Speaker 1: We're excited to have him on the show today, So

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Speaker 1: let's jump right in. On today's show, we have doctor

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Speaker 1: Jonathan McDowell. He's an astrophysicist at the Harvard Smithsonian Center

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Speaker 1: for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He's also the editor of

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Speaker 1: Jonathan's Space Report, a free internet newsletter founded in nineteen

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Speaker 1: eighty nine which provides technical details of satellite launches. His

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Speaker 1: website provides the most comprehensive historical list of satellite launch information,

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Speaker 1: starting with Sputnik. And he's a fellow of the Royal

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Speaker 1: Astronomical Society, an American Astronomical Society fellow, and he has

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Speaker 1: an astro named after him forty five eighty nine McDowell.

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Speaker 1: So he's now officially the second person on the show

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Speaker 1: who has an asteroid named after him. Martin Elvis beat

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Speaker 1: you by a few months there.

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Speaker 4: My old boss. Yes, he was your old boss. He's

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Speaker 4: the one who conned me into crossing the pond and

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Speaker 4: coming to work at Harvard instead of staying in England,

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Speaker 4: which I'm now sort of regretting. Yes, no, Martin, I

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Speaker 4: go back away.

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Speaker 1: Ah, wonderful. Well, he's absolutely lovely. And he talked to

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Speaker 1: us about asteroids. We're talking to you about stuff that's

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Speaker 1: floating around in space. So we had a listener who

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Speaker 1: asked a question, and we're going to play the question

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Speaker 1: a little bit later. But that got us interested in

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Speaker 1: space debris. So I think for starters let's just talk

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Speaker 1: about what kind of stuff we have up there, debris

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Speaker 1: or otherwise that's orbiting the Earth right now.

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Speaker 4: So there are about twenty five thousand objects that the

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Speaker 4: Space Force radars are tracking every day.

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Speaker 1: It's a lot.

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Speaker 3: Twenty five thousand. Wow, that's an incredible number.

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Speaker 4: That's just the ones big enough to see. Right. They

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Speaker 4: go from the four hundred and fifty ton International Space

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Speaker 4: Station down to little shards of debris that are only

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Speaker 4: about five or ten centimeters across to aally bit about

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Speaker 4: where they come from. But below that, between like say

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Speaker 4: one centimeter and ten centimeters, we think there might be

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Speaker 4: as many as a million pieces of debris that we

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Speaker 4: don't even know about because they're too small for the

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Speaker 4: radars to see. So now space is big, but everything

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Speaker 4: in space, because of Kepler's laws, is traveling like seventeen

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Speaker 4: thousand miles an hour. And so you know, it's pretty

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Speaker 4: crazy up there. And we have now ten thousand working satellites.

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Speaker 4: Just five years ago it was only one thousand. Now

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Speaker 4: it's gone up to ten thousand. Is that all starlink,

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Speaker 4: well about half of them a starlin Ghia. And so

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Speaker 4: there's Internet relay, there's Internet of things relay, there's ship

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Speaker 4: and the airplane tracking. There's weather satellites, there's SPIC satellites,

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Speaker 4: resource monitoring satellites, those intelligence which is like intercepting communications

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Speaker 4: and radio signals for the military, and of course a

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Speaker 4: few science satellites. People often think that space is like, oh,

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Speaker 4: that's science, but science is a pretty small fraction of

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Speaker 4: what's going on and what can happen is every time

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Speaker 4: you launch a satellite, you use a rocket to do it,

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Speaker 4: and to put it in orbit. The upper rocket stage

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Speaker 4: has to get into orbit along with the satellite. So

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Speaker 4: now you've launched your satellite, but you've also made a

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Speaker 4: piece of space junk the rocket stage. And nowadays, if

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Speaker 4: you're like prudent, you have a restartable engine. You can

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Speaker 4: bring the rocket stage down in the ocean afterwards. But

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Speaker 4: we didn't used to even bother to do that. So

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Speaker 4: if you look in the catalog of there's now over

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Speaker 4: sixty thousand objects in the Space Object catalog, including all

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Speaker 4: the re entered ones. The second entry in the catalog

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Speaker 4: is Sputnik, Russia's first satellite, but the first entry satellite

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Speaker 4: number one is actually the rocket stage that puts Putnik

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Speaker 4: in orbit and so the very first entry in the

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Speaker 4: catalog is a piece of space jump.

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Speaker 1: Oh that's interesting and depressing.

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Speaker 4: Yeah, what's worse if you leave a little extra fuel

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Speaker 4: in the tank of your rocket stage, which you can

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Speaker 4: tend to do because you don't want to arrive at

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Speaker 4: your destination running on empty rocket stages? Have you know

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Speaker 4: fuel and oxidizer that combine to burn to make the flame,

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Speaker 4: but they're in separate tanks, separated by often like a

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Speaker 4: rubber gasket or something like that, which over years can erode.

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Speaker 4: The two can get together and depending on your mix

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Speaker 4: of propellant, ten years after you abandon your rocket stage

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Speaker 4: in Earth orbit, the fuel and oxidizer can have a

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Speaker 4: party and suddenly you don't have a rocket stage. You

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Speaker 4: have three hundred pieces of space to breathe.

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Speaker 1: Oh my god. So you're saying they explode?

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Speaker 4: That will be the technical term, yes, whereas the space

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Speaker 4: guys like to say an RUD a rapid unplanned disassembly.

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Speaker 4: We have all kinds of euphemisms right for the bad

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Speaker 4: things that can go wrong in sp It's another one

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Speaker 4: of my favorites. Say is you know ICIBM into continent

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Speaker 4: balistic missile, But do you know IOBM, which is in

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Speaker 4: ocean by mistake.

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Speaker 3: Oh no, So what's the sort of natural context, Like

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Speaker 3: we are creating these little bits of space junk, But

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Speaker 3: was the near Earth atmosphere sort of empty before that?

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Speaker 3: Or are there are like a lot of natural things

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Speaker 3: floating out there.

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Speaker 4: So within the orbit of the Moon, we do have

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Speaker 4: like meteors coming in on escape trajectories. Right, they're not

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Speaker 4: orbiting the Earth. They have escape colostoy respect to the Earth.

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Speaker 4: They're going much much faster than satellites, and so they

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Speaker 4: come in, they burn up, they're gone. They don't hang

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Speaker 4: out in Earth orbit. The only piece of natural space

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Speaker 4: junk we have orbiting the Earth is the Moon.

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Speaker 3: You can't call the moon junk.

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Speaker 4: Come on, you know, it's a big love huston. You know.

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Speaker 4: We added to that with Spootnak and we've added ever since.

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Speaker 4: Again not just rocket stages blowing up, but also satellite's

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Speaker 4: hitting each other. So in two thousand and nine and

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Speaker 4: an Iridium communication satellite hit an old Soviet dead communication

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Speaker 4: satellite at about twenty thousand miles an hour in orbit.

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Speaker 4: And to give you an idea of the kinetic energy

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Speaker 4: involved in that, right, I mean it's like some number

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Speaker 4: of gigajuls. And now you don't have a feel for that.

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Speaker 4: So I calculated in terms of my unit of how

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Speaker 4: hard something hurts is. Imagine being hit by a one

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Speaker 4: ton truck. You can kind of sense how much that

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Speaker 4: would hurt. The energy involved in one of these orbital

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Speaker 4: collisions is about fifty thousand times that.

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Speaker 1: Wow, wow, oh my gosh.

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Speaker 4: And so what happens is a hypersonic shockwave goes through

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Speaker 4: both spacecraft, reducing them to shrapnel. The clouds of shrapnel

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Speaker 4: passed through each other largely unchanged, and you end up

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Speaker 4: with them in the original orbit, but many many little

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Speaker 4: pieces instead of one big one. So we don't like that.

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Speaker 4: That's bad. It can cause it. Ultimately, if you have

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Speaker 4: enough of those, you can get a chain reaction called

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Speaker 4: the Kestler syndrome that could make space unusable. And then,

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Speaker 4: you know, some people think it's fun to fire a

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Speaker 4: missile at one of their own satellites and blow it

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Speaker 4: up just to show how powerful they are anti satellite weapons,

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Speaker 4: and that causes yet there's more debris due to that.

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Speaker 4: There's been a move in recent years to go, you know, guys,

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Speaker 4: that's probably not a good idea.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, let's stick into that a little bit more so.

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Speaker 1: I know that the Soviet Union, the United States, India, China, right,

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Speaker 1: they've all blown their own satellites up in space, is

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Speaker 1: that right?

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Speaker 4: That is correct? Fortunately, so far they've only been tests

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Speaker 4: on their own satellites and not attacking somebody else's.

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Speaker 1: So for our audience who's maybe not familiar with this,

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Speaker 1: why are countries blowing up their own satellites.

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Speaker 4: Right, it's to prove that they could blow up your

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Speaker 4: satellites if they want it. And so the idea, you know,

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Speaker 4: what people may not appreciate is so much of our

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Speaker 4: lives today actually invisibly depends in space technology. I mean

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Speaker 4: the most obvious case, of course is GPS. I actually

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Speaker 4: know how to read a map, but the younger generation

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Speaker 4: are going to be really hosed if GPS ever goes down.

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Speaker 4: They're not going to be able to get home. And

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Speaker 4: that was originally a military system to target CRUISMUSS and

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Speaker 4: so that's in a war, taking out the GPS satellites

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Speaker 4: would be something that an attacker might want to do. Similarly,

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Speaker 4: military allund space communications. There are missile warning satellites that

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Speaker 4: spot when a missile is launched, and that's you know,

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Speaker 4: how you get that warning. And there are these sort

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Speaker 4: of very spic satellites, right, and so the military, even

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Speaker 4: more than normal people, are so very invested in space.

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Speaker 4: Their systems are integrated with space systems, and so in

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Speaker 4: a war, those space systems are obvious targets. And so

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Speaker 4: the idea of anti satellite weapons has been around for

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Speaker 4: a long time. The first attempt that I'm aware of

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Speaker 4: was in nineteen fifty nine when they fired a test

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Speaker 4: missile against the Explorer six satellite and missed it. But

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Speaker 4: it's not a new idea, that's what I'm saying. So

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Speaker 4: all of these things, you know, very early. The fifties

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Speaker 4: were a crazy time, man, They tried all kinds of

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Speaker 4: stuff very early.

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Speaker 3: And so every time we blow up a satellite, you

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Speaker 3: go from one object in space to like a million

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Speaker 3: objects in space. Do we then track all of those

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Speaker 3: individual components?

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Speaker 4: Yeah, well, the ones above ten centimeters we track. And

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Speaker 4: so sometimes people talk about shooting down a satellite, but

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Speaker 4: I hate that phrase because you don't actually shoot it down.

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Speaker 4: You add energy, you especially in the pieces, but those

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Speaker 4: pieces still have orbital velocity and they stay in limit.

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Speaker 4: And so if you have a satellite that's say in

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Speaker 4: a five hundred kilometer circular orbit. The pieces are in

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Speaker 4: elliptical orbits that are one end is five hundred and

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Speaker 4: then the other end might be lower, or it might

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Speaker 4: be higher, as much as one thousand kilometers or two

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Speaker 4: thousand kilometers coming down to the ones that go down

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Speaker 4: where you know we'll re enter quickly. The ones that

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Speaker 4: go up will stay up for a long time. And

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Speaker 4: so the worst one was a China Ease anti satellite

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Speaker 4: test in two thousand and seven, and that created three

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Speaker 4: thousand pieces of tracked debris. And so in my catalog

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Speaker 4: that I have on my website is each one of

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Speaker 4: those three thousand pieces has a catalog number from the

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Speaker 4: Space Force, It has orbital parameters that are updated every day.

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Speaker 4: It's quite a tusk keeping track of these things.

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Speaker 3: So there's some random chunk of a satellite that has

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Speaker 3: like a name and a place in your database, and

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Speaker 3: you're tracking and it's just like a hunk of metal

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Speaker 3: floating through.

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Speaker 4: Space that's exactly right. And you know, every now and again,

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Speaker 4: for example, the International Space Station has to dodge one

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Speaker 4: of these things. So the Space Force tressing goes, oh hey, guys,

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Speaker 4: about twenty four hours from now, this chunk of metal

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Speaker 4: is going to go within a few hundred meters of

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Speaker 4: the space station.

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Speaker 3: Wait before we get to the ISS, how do we

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Speaker 3: track all these things? Like who is tracking this random

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Speaker 3: chunk of Chinese satellite? How do we monitor these things?

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Speaker 4: So mostly it's the US Space Force route. For low

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Speaker 4: orbit satellites, they use radars, so you bounce radar radio

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Speaker 4: energy off the satellite and the echo gives you its

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Speaker 4: position and velocity. But it's a problem because if you

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Speaker 4: have like say one hundred new pieces that you're tracking,

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Speaker 4: so you see them come over, Okay, you get measurements

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Speaker 4: of one hundred pieces. An hour and a half later,

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Speaker 4: they've orbited the Earth. You look again, you've got another

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Speaker 4: one hundred pieces. But matching up which one goes with

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Speaker 4: which one is very non trivial. Yeah, and so it

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Speaker 4: takes a long time to catalog the debris, and that's

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Speaker 4: a period you're not getting warnings from those new objects.

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Speaker 4: So that's why new debris is very bad. Radars are

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Speaker 4: great up to about one thousand kilometers. A few thousand kilometers,

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Speaker 4: they're a one over art of the fourth law. If

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Speaker 4: the thing is ten times further away, it's ten thousand

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Speaker 4: times weaker reflected single. So for high orbit satellites, radars

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Speaker 4: really aren't the way to go, and we've been using

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Speaker 4: regular optical telescopes to observe the objects. And now we're

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Speaker 4: actually starting to deploy satellites in high orbit whose job

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Speaker 4: is to catalog all the other satellites and keep track

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Speaker 4: of them.

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Speaker 3: Why is it one over out of the fourth? Is

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Speaker 3: it because you get one of our r squared from

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Speaker 3: your signal and then one of o are squared from

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Speaker 3: the bounce.

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Speaker 4: Exactly right, it's one of our squared each way.

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Speaker 3: Wow, I see. So that's difficult. It seems to be

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Speaker 3: like a really hard problem, even if you know where

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Speaker 3: everything is, even if there's nothing new, because radar is

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Speaker 3: just giving you locations, right, it doesn't measure velocities.

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Speaker 4: Yes, there's a dopplers, but it's only one component. Oh right, okay, right,

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Speaker 4: you have arrange an arrange rate, and then you only

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Speaker 4: have a very approximate angular position on the sky because

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Speaker 4: the radar is very sharp, and so you need multiple

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Speaker 4: observations to kind of resolve that and do it. So again,

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Speaker 4: this is something they've been doing since the nineteen fifties,

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Speaker 4: and it was kind of manageable back then, and there

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Speaker 4: weren't that many satellites, and now it's getting a really

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Speaker 4: tough problem and you can see them struggling. There was

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Speaker 4: a recent Chinese satellite launch. Eighteen satellites went up about

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Speaker 4: a month ago, and it was only yesterday that Space

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Speaker 4: Farce started issuing orbital for them because it took them

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Speaker 4: that long to sort it out. It's a fascinating problem

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Speaker 4: and really technically challenging, and in the circumstances they do

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Speaker 4: a pretty good job, but it's not really good enough

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Speaker 4: for what we need today.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, it seems like a lot of compute is required.

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Speaker 3: You have to know all these trajectories, predict where they are,

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Speaker 3: get the new data, update the trajectories if they are

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Speaker 3: dev from your prediction. I'm wondering about the security here,

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Speaker 3: Like there must be things in space that are like

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Speaker 3: secret spy satellites. Are those parts of your database? Is

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Speaker 3: the NSA watching you to see if you're tracking that stuff.

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Speaker 4: If they're not, they're not doing their job.

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Speaker 1: You've really acclimated to life in the United States Johnson, Yeah.

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Speaker 4: Right, exactly. The secret satellites are tracked by the Space Force.

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Speaker 4: The US secret satellites, they don't release the orbital data

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Speaker 4: for that publicly. The Russian and Chinese secret satellites they do.

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Speaker 4: The Israeli and French ones they sometimes do sometimes that

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Speaker 4: so our friends they keep the cle one secret. But

390
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Speaker 4: for people we don't like, we just publish them. Very recently,

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Speaker 4: there was maybe one hundred or so secret US and

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Speaker 4: Allied satellites, and most of them were pretty big. Some

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Speaker 4: of the old big Bird Spy satellites are like ten

394
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Speaker 4: tons right in low orbit, and so they're as bright

395
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Speaker 4: as the brightest stars in the sky. And so in

396
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Speaker 4: order to get their orbits, all you really need are

397
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Speaker 4: binoculars in the Stopwatch, sometimes not even binoculars.

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Speaker 3: So it's in this category of like officially secret but

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Speaker 3: totally obvious exactly.

400
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Speaker 4: So, you know, we figure that a bunch of amateurs

401
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Speaker 4: whose hobby is to fill in the holes and let

402
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Speaker 4: the orbits of the satellites that aren't meant to be public,

403
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Speaker 4: and we feel fine about that because we figure that

404
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Speaker 4: if a bunch of amateur astronomers with binoculars can figure

405
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Speaker 4: out these orbits, the North Koreans can too, you know.

406
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Speaker 4: And so I think for a long time, the space

407
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Speaker 4: force were a bit of denial. The air forces was

408
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Speaker 4: there were a bit of denial that they would ask us,

409
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Speaker 4: what sensors are you using to detect our satellites up? Oh,

410
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Speaker 4: we look up, it's come on overhead. There it is.

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Speaker 4: And so I think now there's more of a realization

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Speaker 4: that actually pretty fruitless trying to keep these orbits secret.

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Speaker 4: And I think in the long run for safety of

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Speaker 4: space operations so that other people know not to bump

415
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Speaker 4: into them, the era of making the orbit data secret

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Speaker 4: has got to end, I think, and that's an active discussion.

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Speaker 3: Have we ever had a secret satellite blow up or

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Speaker 3: turn into secret space debris?

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Speaker 4: Absolutely, absolutely secret space junk.

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Speaker 3: I never heard of that before.

421
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Speaker 4: I think the most common case is the upper stage

422
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Speaker 4: from one of these satellites blew up and created a

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Speaker 4: lot of debris. And so for a long time those

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Speaker 4: orbital data were secret classified. But they kind of wised

425
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Speaker 4: up eventually and released that. So that's good. There's been

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Speaker 4: some improvements lately in the transparency of the system, which

427
00:21:50,720 --> 00:21:53,080
Speaker 4: I'm pleased to see that slowly. Know, there was a

428
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Speaker 4: lot of like Cold War mentality, and now it's sort

429
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Speaker 4: of even though we may be going to another Cold

430
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Speaker 4: War or whatever. But see, one of the big things

431
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Speaker 4: that's changed in the past ten years. As it used

432
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Speaker 4: to be I would give talks, I would say space

433
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Speaker 4: is about one third civilian government, one third military, and

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Speaker 4: one third commercial. Those days are gone. Now space is

435
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Speaker 4: overwhelming the commercial and that means that the incentives at

436
00:22:19,800 --> 00:22:22,840
Speaker 4: the government level right are to support the commercial industry,

437
00:22:23,520 --> 00:22:26,920
Speaker 4: and that means more transparency in terms of not having

438
00:22:26,960 --> 00:22:29,840
Speaker 4: to worry about being hit by secret satellite. There's other

439
00:22:29,920 --> 00:22:34,440
Speaker 4: transparency issues because companies want to keep their plans secret

440
00:22:34,600 --> 00:22:37,199
Speaker 4: and things like that for commercial reasons. So that's a

441
00:22:37,200 --> 00:22:40,159
Speaker 4: whole other issue. So times have really changed the last

442
00:22:40,280 --> 00:22:43,240
Speaker 4: five to ten years. It's been a dramatic shift towards

443
00:22:43,240 --> 00:22:44,840
Speaker 4: this new era of commercial space.

444
00:22:45,240 --> 00:22:48,080
Speaker 3: And what's your interest in it? I mean, you're an astrophysicist.

445
00:22:48,200 --> 00:22:50,560
Speaker 3: Are you curious about this because you're just curious about

446
00:22:50,600 --> 00:22:53,680
Speaker 3: anything in space? Or is this like political advocacy where

447
00:22:53,680 --> 00:22:55,480
Speaker 3: you feel like, hey, space is for everyone and we

448
00:22:55,480 --> 00:22:56,760
Speaker 3: should all know what's up there.

449
00:22:57,080 --> 00:22:59,000
Speaker 4: You know, it's changed recently. So yeah, I've had this

450
00:22:59,160 --> 00:23:02,439
Speaker 4: separate life since I was a kid of wanting to

451
00:23:02,440 --> 00:23:04,760
Speaker 4: know what was going on in space. And you know,

452
00:23:04,920 --> 00:23:08,480
Speaker 4: I found this list of the year's satellite launches when

453
00:23:08,520 --> 00:23:12,240
Speaker 4: I was about twelve, and I very quickly realized after

454
00:23:12,280 --> 00:23:15,040
Speaker 4: copying it down that it wasn't really that grain of list.

455
00:23:15,080 --> 00:23:18,320
Speaker 4: They could do better. And so fifty years later I

456
00:23:18,320 --> 00:23:22,119
Speaker 4: have the best list because I'm obsessive like that, and

457
00:23:22,160 --> 00:23:24,680
Speaker 4: so that was sort of my original impetus. And I've

458
00:23:24,680 --> 00:23:27,479
Speaker 4: got more and more dragged into the policy side. And

459
00:23:27,520 --> 00:23:32,680
Speaker 4: then as space has started to become so busy that

460
00:23:32,760 --> 00:23:36,600
Speaker 4: we humans are starting to have an impact on the

461
00:23:36,600 --> 00:23:41,800
Speaker 4: space environment, and part of that is an impact on astronomy.

462
00:23:42,960 --> 00:23:46,080
Speaker 4: My two lives of astronomer and space pundit have kind

463
00:23:46,119 --> 00:23:50,719
Speaker 4: of merged and very much now are becoming advocacy and

464
00:23:50,800 --> 00:23:55,320
Speaker 4: becoming the Cassandra saying, hey, guys, we've got a problem

465
00:23:55,359 --> 00:23:59,920
Speaker 4: here with the overwhelming effect that we are now having

466
00:24:00,119 --> 00:24:02,800
Speaker 4: the space environment in a lot of different ways, and

467
00:24:02,840 --> 00:24:06,959
Speaker 4: the need for new regulation to adapt to the new

468
00:24:07,040 --> 00:24:07,920
Speaker 4: environment that we're in.

469
00:24:08,160 --> 00:24:10,160
Speaker 1: Well, let's take a quick break and when we get back,

470
00:24:10,200 --> 00:24:30,119
Speaker 1: we'll talk about policy and impacts. And we're back. So

471
00:24:30,400 --> 00:24:33,440
Speaker 1: there's all this junk floating around in space, and I'm

472
00:24:33,480 --> 00:24:35,639
Speaker 1: under the impression that part of why it's hard to

473
00:24:35,680 --> 00:24:40,280
Speaker 1: remove the junk from space is because there's policies that

474
00:24:40,520 --> 00:24:42,919
Speaker 1: make it difficult to take someone else's junk out of

475
00:24:42,920 --> 00:24:46,000
Speaker 1: space without like getting their permission first. Is that correct?

476
00:24:46,080 --> 00:24:47,960
Speaker 1: And what's holding us back from removing all of that

477
00:24:48,040 --> 00:24:48,800
Speaker 1: junk from space?

478
00:24:49,200 --> 00:24:52,359
Speaker 4: Right? That is hard of it? And so yes, the

479
00:24:52,400 --> 00:24:57,080
Speaker 4: Outer Space Treaty says that unlike say, stuff abandoned in

480
00:24:57,080 --> 00:25:01,400
Speaker 4: the ocean, stuff in space you can't abandon it. It's

481
00:25:01,400 --> 00:25:03,639
Speaker 4: still your problem. And the outer space you didn't have

482
00:25:03,680 --> 00:25:05,520
Speaker 4: an idea of companies or anything like that. And so

483
00:25:05,560 --> 00:25:07,760
Speaker 4: if you want to put something in space your like SpaceX,

484
00:25:07,800 --> 00:25:10,240
Speaker 4: for example, you've got to get a license from your

485
00:25:10,280 --> 00:25:12,639
Speaker 4: government in this case of the US, and part of

486
00:25:12,680 --> 00:25:16,760
Speaker 4: that license is then the US as a country takes

487
00:25:16,840 --> 00:25:20,919
Speaker 4: on the duty of jurisdiction and the control of that satellite.

488
00:25:21,359 --> 00:25:25,000
Speaker 4: And so that means if there's an old Russian rocket

489
00:25:25,040 --> 00:25:29,119
Speaker 4: stage orbiting that's been abandoned for thirty years, I can't

490
00:25:29,200 --> 00:25:33,040
Speaker 4: go up and take it without getting Russian permission because

491
00:25:33,080 --> 00:25:38,560
Speaker 4: it's still theirs. And so that is seen by the

492
00:25:38,720 --> 00:25:42,040
Speaker 4: space lawyers, particularly in the US, as a big, big

493
00:25:42,080 --> 00:25:44,320
Speaker 4: problem that they don't want to they kind of run

494
00:25:44,400 --> 00:25:47,679
Speaker 4: and hide whenever you bring it up. I do feel

495
00:25:47,680 --> 00:25:50,840
Speaker 4: this is a solvable problem that no one wants the

496
00:25:50,880 --> 00:25:53,639
Speaker 4: space junk. One thing I'm encouraged by. So there's a

497
00:25:53,640 --> 00:25:57,320
Speaker 4: company called Astroscale which is based in Tokyo and in

498
00:25:57,359 --> 00:26:01,239
Speaker 4: the UK, and they've been recently through satellite around a

499
00:26:01,240 --> 00:26:05,040
Speaker 4: big old Japanese rocket stage, observing it as sort of

500
00:26:05,440 --> 00:26:08,399
Speaker 4: a preparatory mission to having the technology to remove it

501
00:26:08,400 --> 00:26:10,800
Speaker 4: from orbit. And I think companies like that that are

502
00:26:10,840 --> 00:26:13,439
Speaker 4: sort of have an international basis. If you can do

503
00:26:13,560 --> 00:26:18,000
Speaker 4: sort of bilateral thing where say a European mission takes

504
00:26:18,119 --> 00:26:22,200
Speaker 4: out a Japanese piece of space junk with both countries agreement,

505
00:26:22,600 --> 00:26:25,720
Speaker 4: you can sort of set a tone that you can

506
00:26:25,760 --> 00:26:28,480
Speaker 4: then grow later to go okay, so we've done this,

507
00:26:28,560 --> 00:26:30,400
Speaker 4: you see, we're not doing anything that fair. Yes, we're

508
00:26:30,440 --> 00:26:34,080
Speaker 4: cleaning out the orbit. Hey, Russian guys, can you join

509
00:26:34,200 --> 00:26:36,880
Speaker 4: us and help us get rid of your junk too?

510
00:26:37,359 --> 00:26:40,280
Speaker 4: And I think that's the way forward. But you know, obviously,

511
00:26:40,320 --> 00:26:43,760
Speaker 4: in the world political situation as it is, it's not trivial.

512
00:26:43,880 --> 00:26:45,240
Speaker 1: And I was talking to someone the other day who

513
00:26:45,280 --> 00:26:47,280
Speaker 1: was saying that one of the problems with these technologies

514
00:26:47,280 --> 00:26:50,119
Speaker 1: for clearing out space junk. Is that you can say like, oh,

515
00:26:50,160 --> 00:26:51,719
Speaker 1: I'm going out there for space junk, and that's why

516
00:26:51,760 --> 00:26:53,359
Speaker 1: I've got the laser, and that's why I've got this

517
00:26:53,560 --> 00:26:55,199
Speaker 1: arm so that I can grab your space junk and

518
00:26:55,240 --> 00:26:57,320
Speaker 1: throw it down so it'll burn up in the atmosphere.

519
00:26:57,640 --> 00:26:59,959
Speaker 1: But that's all dual use. That laser can be us

520
00:27:00,320 --> 00:27:03,320
Speaker 1: to destroy someone else's satellite. That grappling arm you can

521
00:27:03,320 --> 00:27:05,960
Speaker 1: throw someone else. And that is that actually holding anything back?

522
00:27:06,080 --> 00:27:08,760
Speaker 1: Or are people just willing to accept that when you

523
00:27:08,800 --> 00:27:11,600
Speaker 1: develop the technology to remove stuff from space, maybe you're

524
00:27:11,600 --> 00:27:13,760
Speaker 1: also developing some dual use stuff to get used down

525
00:27:13,800 --> 00:27:14,120
Speaker 1: the road.

526
00:27:14,359 --> 00:27:17,280
Speaker 4: I think it's an issue that people bring up. I

527
00:27:17,320 --> 00:27:19,239
Speaker 4: mean personally, I think that's good. I hate the term

528
00:27:19,320 --> 00:27:21,600
Speaker 4: dual use. It's like everything is dual used. You know,

529
00:27:21,840 --> 00:27:26,280
Speaker 4: I can stab you with my pen, yeah, I mean yes,

530
00:27:26,320 --> 00:27:29,919
Speaker 4: of course, any satellite that's maneuverable can be maneuvered to

531
00:27:30,080 --> 00:27:32,359
Speaker 4: kind of you know, smash into your satellite, right, yeah,

532
00:27:32,400 --> 00:27:36,040
Speaker 4: and principle, And so I think that's just an excuse

533
00:27:36,160 --> 00:27:39,800
Speaker 4: for not doing anything, okay, or just an expression of mistrust.

534
00:27:40,240 --> 00:27:44,000
Speaker 4: You know, that is gettable over in my opinion, but

535
00:27:44,040 --> 00:27:45,760
Speaker 4: it's going to take a while, so I think, you know,

536
00:27:45,960 --> 00:27:48,560
Speaker 4: the last ten years, we've seen a bunch of experiments.

537
00:27:48,720 --> 00:27:50,960
Speaker 4: The British in particular did a fun set of experiments

538
00:27:50,960 --> 00:27:54,720
Speaker 4: where they sent a harpoon at a target to try

539
00:27:54,760 --> 00:27:58,040
Speaker 4: and catch it. They threw a net around the satellite

540
00:27:58,160 --> 00:28:00,720
Speaker 4: to reel it in and catch it. So people are

541
00:28:00,880 --> 00:28:04,959
Speaker 4: trying crazy stuff, and we're sort of starting to settle

542
00:28:04,960 --> 00:28:07,720
Speaker 4: on Okay, what are the approaches that will actually work,

543
00:28:08,240 --> 00:28:10,040
Speaker 4: And I think then the next step is to go

544
00:28:10,080 --> 00:28:12,639
Speaker 4: and actually do it for real and starting. The first

545
00:28:12,680 --> 00:28:16,480
Speaker 4: people to do this were actually, surprisingly the Chinese. The

546
00:28:16,600 --> 00:28:20,200
Speaker 4: Chinese a couple of years ago, they had this navigation

547
00:28:20,320 --> 00:28:23,320
Speaker 4: satellite in geostationary orbit that had died and was just

548
00:28:23,440 --> 00:28:27,680
Speaker 4: drifting in the traffic lane, you know, And so they

549
00:28:27,720 --> 00:28:30,479
Speaker 4: sent up another satellite that went and locked onto it,

550
00:28:30,520 --> 00:28:34,040
Speaker 4: probably with a robot arm or something, and brought it

551
00:28:34,119 --> 00:28:37,159
Speaker 4: up three hundred kilometers into what we call the graveyard,

552
00:28:37,480 --> 00:28:40,000
Speaker 4: a sort of a space junk yard, and released it

553
00:28:40,040 --> 00:28:42,960
Speaker 4: there and then went back down to go look for

554
00:28:43,040 --> 00:28:45,719
Speaker 4: other target. And that was the first time that anyone

555
00:28:45,760 --> 00:28:51,840
Speaker 4: had actually done kind of garbage truck space debris removal

556
00:28:52,520 --> 00:28:55,640
Speaker 4: for real with a real piece of space debris, and

557
00:28:55,720 --> 00:28:57,920
Speaker 4: so you know the fact that the US hasn't done

558
00:28:57,960 --> 00:29:00,000
Speaker 4: that yet is frankly a little bit of better.

559
00:29:00,720 --> 00:29:02,720
Speaker 1: Yeah, it would be nice for leading the cleanup.

560
00:29:02,840 --> 00:29:05,160
Speaker 3: I have a sort of naive question as a physicist,

561
00:29:05,320 --> 00:29:08,640
Speaker 3: like if the natural environment is just the Moon, that

562
00:29:08,760 --> 00:29:12,640
Speaker 3: suggests that there's some process of clearing the near Earth

563
00:29:12,760 --> 00:29:15,959
Speaker 3: orbit of bits like that if you had rocks coming in,

564
00:29:16,000 --> 00:29:18,680
Speaker 3: they would naturally gravitate together or something. What is the

565
00:29:18,720 --> 00:29:21,520
Speaker 3: sort of timescale for nature to take care of this itself,

566
00:29:21,800 --> 00:29:24,000
Speaker 3: for it to like form a ring or to pull

567
00:29:24,080 --> 00:29:26,120
Speaker 3: together into a new moon made of space junk.

568
00:29:26,280 --> 00:29:29,760
Speaker 4: If you just leave the satellite population as it is, yeah,

569
00:29:29,800 --> 00:29:32,760
Speaker 4: what happens? And yeah, let's say if the Earth were

570
00:29:32,760 --> 00:29:35,880
Speaker 4: a perfectly round, you know, point source, and the Moon

571
00:29:35,880 --> 00:29:38,440
Speaker 4: and the Sun didn't exist, then things were just orbit

572
00:29:38,480 --> 00:29:42,600
Speaker 4: forever without changing their orbital prepence. The Earth has an atmosphere,

573
00:29:43,320 --> 00:29:47,120
Speaker 4: and so below about one thousand kilometers there's just enough

574
00:29:47,160 --> 00:29:50,240
Speaker 4: atmosphere to have a headwind at all glo velocities that

575
00:29:50,360 --> 00:29:53,840
Speaker 4: will eventually bring stuff back down into the atmosphere, and

576
00:29:53,880 --> 00:29:57,360
Speaker 4: that timescale is every eleven years. We have the famous

577
00:29:57,360 --> 00:30:01,320
Speaker 4: solar cycle, the solar maximum that makes the atmosphere more dense,

578
00:30:02,000 --> 00:30:05,840
Speaker 4: and that basically clears out everything below five hundred kilometers

579
00:30:06,160 --> 00:30:08,160
Speaker 4: in one or two cycles. So if you blow five

580
00:30:08,200 --> 00:30:10,680
Speaker 4: or six hundred kilometers, you're going to re enter the

581
00:30:10,680 --> 00:30:14,680
Speaker 4: Earth's atmosphere within twenty something years. But if you're between

582
00:30:14,880 --> 00:30:18,719
Speaker 4: like six hundred kilometers and ten thousand kilometers, you're going

583
00:30:18,800 --> 00:30:23,560
Speaker 4: to stay orbiting for centuries to millennia. There really isn't

584
00:30:23,640 --> 00:30:27,360
Speaker 4: that much affecting you. The Moon's far enough out that

585
00:30:27,440 --> 00:30:30,360
Speaker 4: it's not really bothering you. Once you get beyond like

586
00:30:30,400 --> 00:30:33,520
Speaker 4: one hundred thousand kilometers, now you have to start worrying

587
00:30:33,560 --> 00:30:36,200
Speaker 4: about the gravity of the Moon and the Sun, and

588
00:30:36,280 --> 00:30:41,040
Speaker 4: that will squeeze and turn your orbit and it's fun. Actually,

589
00:30:41,040 --> 00:30:44,280
Speaker 4: there are weird things like the Kosi effect that exoplanet

590
00:30:44,320 --> 00:30:48,480
Speaker 4: astronomers are really into, but also apply in Earth satellite stuff.

591
00:30:48,520 --> 00:30:50,360
Speaker 4: There's a lot of parallels in the math.

592
00:30:50,640 --> 00:30:52,560
Speaker 1: The bail just wants to know what's the Cose effect.

593
00:30:52,760 --> 00:30:54,720
Speaker 4: So what it is is if you have an elliptical

594
00:30:54,840 --> 00:30:57,880
Speaker 4: orbit and there's another body like the Moon, tugging on you,

595
00:30:58,680 --> 00:31:02,040
Speaker 4: what it does is it's wheezes and stretches the orbit,

596
00:31:02,080 --> 00:31:05,120
Speaker 4: so it becomes more and less elliptrical in a periodic way,

597
00:31:05,520 --> 00:31:08,400
Speaker 4: and at the same time tilts the orbit relative to

598
00:31:08,440 --> 00:31:11,640
Speaker 4: the equator. So the satellite I work on, Shander is

599
00:31:11,640 --> 00:31:14,840
Speaker 4: in an orbit like that, and over a decade or so,

600
00:31:15,160 --> 00:31:18,600
Speaker 4: it goes from almost equatorial to almost polar and back again.

601
00:31:19,320 --> 00:31:22,400
Speaker 4: And the low point of the orbit started off with

602
00:31:22,440 --> 00:31:24,720
Speaker 4: ten thousand kilometers, it goes up to like fifteen thousand,

603
00:31:24,800 --> 00:31:27,600
Speaker 4: comes down to five thousand, back up again. And if

604
00:31:27,640 --> 00:31:30,120
Speaker 4: you get the Sun and Moon aligne you could even

605
00:31:30,200 --> 00:31:32,280
Speaker 4: have the low point go negative, which would be the

606
00:31:32,360 --> 00:31:34,800
Speaker 4: end of the mission because then you try to orbit

607
00:31:34,920 --> 00:31:37,040
Speaker 4: through the surface of the Earth. Doesn't work very well.

608
00:31:37,440 --> 00:31:40,240
Speaker 4: And so that's just one example of all the funky

609
00:31:40,320 --> 00:31:43,320
Speaker 4: stuff that can happen. The flattening of the Earth can

610
00:31:43,360 --> 00:31:44,000
Speaker 4: be important.

611
00:31:44,400 --> 00:31:47,800
Speaker 3: What about the gravitation between the objects? Like I understood

612
00:31:47,800 --> 00:31:50,720
Speaker 3: that if you have some huge set of debris in

613
00:31:50,840 --> 00:31:53,480
Speaker 3: orbit around a planet, if it's close below the roach limit,

614
00:31:53,720 --> 00:31:56,440
Speaker 3: the tidal forces will keep it from coalescing. For listeners

615
00:31:56,480 --> 00:31:59,320
Speaker 3: who aren't familiar, the Roche limit is how close you

616
00:31:59,360 --> 00:32:02,160
Speaker 3: can get to a planet before its tidal forces will

617
00:32:02,160 --> 00:32:05,719
Speaker 3: pull you apart. We have tidal forces from planets because

618
00:32:05,880 --> 00:32:09,080
Speaker 3: the planet's gravity pulls on the closer bit harder than

619
00:32:09,120 --> 00:32:11,200
Speaker 3: on the further bit. But if you're far enough away

620
00:32:11,200 --> 00:32:14,000
Speaker 3: from the planet, your internal structure can still hold you together.

621
00:32:14,360 --> 00:32:16,600
Speaker 3: But if a moon, for example, gets too close to

622
00:32:16,640 --> 00:32:20,040
Speaker 3: a planet, those tidal forces will pull it apart, shred it,

623
00:32:20,080 --> 00:32:22,080
Speaker 3: and turn it into a ring. But if it's far

624
00:32:22,200 --> 00:32:25,040
Speaker 3: enough away, the self gravity will eventually pull it together

625
00:32:25,080 --> 00:32:27,760
Speaker 3: into a new moon. Could that happen eventually with all

626
00:32:27,800 --> 00:32:28,600
Speaker 3: of our space junk?

627
00:32:28,800 --> 00:32:31,680
Speaker 4: I haven't done that math. I doubt it. I think

628
00:32:31,720 --> 00:32:36,080
Speaker 4: the total mass isn't enough to get self gravitating. We've

629
00:32:36,120 --> 00:32:39,000
Speaker 4: launched maybe twenty tons of stuff.

630
00:32:39,440 --> 00:32:41,080
Speaker 3: That sounds like a lot, but I guess it's not

631
00:32:41,120 --> 00:32:42,800
Speaker 3: compared to an astronomical object yet.

632
00:32:42,920 --> 00:32:46,280
Speaker 4: Yeah, not compared to even a fairly small moon. My

633
00:32:46,520 --> 00:32:48,680
Speaker 4: guess is that that would not happen.

634
00:32:49,000 --> 00:32:51,560
Speaker 3: Maybe we should use a moon as a unit of

635
00:32:51,560 --> 00:32:54,000
Speaker 3: measuring how much space junk we put into this otter,

636
00:32:54,200 --> 00:32:56,000
Speaker 3: because it makes us feel better about it.

637
00:32:56,040 --> 00:32:58,840
Speaker 4: The International standard Moon. Yeah, okay, I'll take that out

638
00:32:58,920 --> 00:33:00,280
Speaker 4: a consideration. Daniels.

639
00:33:02,280 --> 00:33:04,680
Speaker 1: All right, so when you were describing Chandra's orbit, it's

640
00:33:04,680 --> 00:33:06,400
Speaker 1: becoming even more clear to me how hard it must

641
00:33:06,400 --> 00:33:08,160
Speaker 1: be to track all of these objects because they're all

642
00:33:08,160 --> 00:33:10,120
Speaker 1: doing their own sort of things while they're out there.

643
00:33:10,280 --> 00:33:11,960
Speaker 1: So we've got all of this junk that's sort of

644
00:33:11,960 --> 00:33:14,000
Speaker 1: hard to track, do you It sort of touched on

645
00:33:14,000 --> 00:33:17,040
Speaker 1: the Kessler syndrome. Let's dive into that a little bit more.

646
00:33:17,320 --> 00:33:17,440
Speaker 4: So.

647
00:33:17,520 --> 00:33:19,600
Speaker 1: Space is huge. How big of a risk is it

648
00:33:19,600 --> 00:33:21,880
Speaker 1: that we're going to start getting these feedbacks where everything

649
00:33:21,920 --> 00:33:23,720
Speaker 1: runs into each other. Let's talk about that.

650
00:33:24,120 --> 00:33:29,040
Speaker 4: So space is huge, but lower orbit isn't that huge, right,

651
00:33:29,120 --> 00:33:31,640
Speaker 4: So if we focus on the busiest part of space

652
00:33:31,760 --> 00:33:34,120
Speaker 4: right now from the human point of view, which is

653
00:33:34,280 --> 00:33:37,880
Speaker 4: all the satellites between the bottom of the US atmosphere

654
00:33:37,920 --> 00:33:41,720
Speaker 4: and about two thousand kilometers, there's a lot of stuff there.

655
00:33:41,920 --> 00:33:46,280
Speaker 4: The average distance between any two objects it's about one

656
00:33:46,320 --> 00:33:50,280
Speaker 4: hundred kilometers, but you're going at twenty five thousand kilometers

657
00:33:50,320 --> 00:33:53,640
Speaker 4: an hour. So the analogy I always use is, you know,

658
00:33:53,640 --> 00:33:56,520
Speaker 4: if you're driving on the highway, we're always reminded the

659
00:33:56,640 --> 00:34:00,840
Speaker 4: faster you go, the further you have to the distance

660
00:34:00,880 --> 00:34:04,400
Speaker 4: from the car in front of you. Right, So when

661
00:34:04,440 --> 00:34:07,600
Speaker 4: you're traveling at twenty five thousand kilometers an hour. You

662
00:34:07,680 --> 00:34:11,120
Speaker 4: don't have a lot of dotch time in one hundred kilometers, right,

663
00:34:11,239 --> 00:34:14,160
Speaker 4: And so we do get collisions, and we're seeing them.

664
00:34:14,200 --> 00:34:16,800
Speaker 4: We're seeing small collisions that are maybe not destroying a

665
00:34:16,840 --> 00:34:20,359
Speaker 4: satellite entirely, but kind of breaking stuff off it. And

666
00:34:20,400 --> 00:34:23,719
Speaker 4: the trouble is that the collision rate goes as the

667
00:34:23,719 --> 00:34:25,239
Speaker 4: square of the number of satellites. So if you have

668
00:34:25,320 --> 00:34:28,320
Speaker 4: ten times as many satellites, you have one hundred times

669
00:34:28,360 --> 00:34:32,120
Speaker 4: as many collisions. So right now, the collision rate is

670
00:34:32,160 --> 00:34:36,360
Speaker 4: not that bad. Even so if you stop launching everything today,

671
00:34:37,000 --> 00:34:40,239
Speaker 4: the collision rate is high enough that eventually, on timescales

672
00:34:40,239 --> 00:34:43,440
Speaker 4: of a century, you would start to get this runaway

673
00:34:43,640 --> 00:34:44,320
Speaker 4: chain reaction.

674
00:34:44,640 --> 00:34:47,040
Speaker 3: What's the collision rate like now, how many collisions do

675
00:34:47,080 --> 00:34:48,279
Speaker 3: we see per day or per year?

676
00:34:48,520 --> 00:34:51,319
Speaker 4: I think we see two or three small ones per year, Okay,

677
00:34:51,560 --> 00:34:54,839
Speaker 4: maybe one big one a decade of order. And so

678
00:34:55,560 --> 00:35:01,160
Speaker 4: that is amplified by what we call breakup events. There's

679
00:35:01,239 --> 00:35:04,840
Speaker 4: not one satellite dumping another, but when the rocket stage

680
00:35:04,840 --> 00:35:07,480
Speaker 4: blows up, for example, and things like that, and we

681
00:35:07,600 --> 00:35:11,719
Speaker 4: have several of those a year, adding hundreds of objects

682
00:35:11,719 --> 00:35:14,280
Speaker 4: to the catalog each year from that kind of source

683
00:35:14,960 --> 00:35:18,160
Speaker 4: the number of debriogis is increasing. It's not like in

684
00:35:18,160 --> 00:35:21,000
Speaker 4: the movie Gravity, right, where everything goes to hell in

685
00:35:21,080 --> 00:35:24,000
Speaker 4: about half an hour. Right, this is something that plays

686
00:35:24,040 --> 00:35:28,120
Speaker 4: out as with most environmental things. Right, you slowly drown

687
00:35:28,239 --> 00:35:32,840
Speaker 4: in your own waste. Right, every year, it's a little

688
00:35:32,880 --> 00:35:34,839
Speaker 4: bit worse and a little worse.

689
00:35:35,040 --> 00:35:35,960
Speaker 3: But it accelerates.

690
00:35:36,000 --> 00:35:36,160
Speaker 4: Right.

691
00:35:36,160 --> 00:35:38,000
Speaker 3: You were saying that the collision rate depends on the

692
00:35:38,080 --> 00:35:40,799
Speaker 3: number of objects squared. So every time you have an

693
00:35:40,800 --> 00:35:43,319
Speaker 3: object that breaks into two, you've increased the number, which

694
00:35:43,320 --> 00:35:45,920
Speaker 3: you know increases the rate of collisions. And that's the

695
00:35:45,960 --> 00:35:46,600
Speaker 3: feedback loop.

696
00:35:46,680 --> 00:35:49,960
Speaker 1: Right, That's exactly correct, yes, And is this all going

697
00:35:50,000 --> 00:35:54,240
Speaker 1: to be exacerbated even more by additional constellations of satellite?

698
00:35:54,320 --> 00:35:58,279
Speaker 1: So SpaceX has their Starlink, but I think China is

699
00:35:58,320 --> 00:35:59,440
Speaker 1: planning something similar.

700
00:36:00,040 --> 00:36:02,640
Speaker 4: I has made the first two launches of its Kianfan

701
00:36:03,000 --> 00:36:07,760
Speaker 4: thousand sales satellites. And you know, people have seen the

702
00:36:07,800 --> 00:36:12,719
Speaker 4: success of Starlink in providing communications in Ukraine, and so

703
00:36:12,920 --> 00:36:16,400
Speaker 4: all the militaries in all the countries want their own.

704
00:36:16,719 --> 00:36:21,640
Speaker 4: We must have control over it ourselves, Starling constellation. And

705
00:36:21,719 --> 00:36:24,480
Speaker 4: so I think in addition to the commercial interests, there's

706
00:36:24,480 --> 00:36:27,120
Speaker 4: military interests, and so yeah, we're going to see more

707
00:36:27,160 --> 00:36:30,440
Speaker 4: and more of these constellations come along. Amazon have started

708
00:36:30,480 --> 00:36:33,960
Speaker 4: deploying theirs. There's a company called e Space that wants

709
00:36:34,000 --> 00:36:38,120
Speaker 4: to launch hundreds of thousands of satellites. So this is

710
00:36:38,160 --> 00:36:41,000
Speaker 4: really happening. You know. What SpaceX will tell you is

711
00:36:41,520 --> 00:36:45,840
Speaker 4: they have this Wizzo algorithm that will fix it in software.

712
00:36:45,920 --> 00:36:50,719
Speaker 4: Basically that the satellites have these argone electric thrusters. They

713
00:36:50,960 --> 00:36:55,279
Speaker 4: accelerate argon atoms with electric potential from solar panels to

714
00:36:55,400 --> 00:36:59,640
Speaker 4: provide low thrust but very many miles per gallon rocket

715
00:36:59,680 --> 00:37:04,279
Speaker 4: engine that can do slow dodges, not fast dodges. And

716
00:37:04,360 --> 00:37:08,400
Speaker 4: so they're always calculating. You know, they're doing thousands and

717
00:37:08,480 --> 00:37:13,040
Speaker 4: thousands of small maneuvers to avoid each other and other

718
00:37:13,080 --> 00:37:17,600
Speaker 4: people's satellites, and they're like, we got this, you know,

719
00:37:18,200 --> 00:37:21,440
Speaker 4: we know how to do this. I think their math

720
00:37:21,520 --> 00:37:24,760
Speaker 4: works out if you assume that the you know, errors

721
00:37:24,800 --> 00:37:29,960
Speaker 4: are always Bell curve and you know, but that's not reality.

722
00:37:30,040 --> 00:37:33,000
Speaker 4: The reality is that, as we say in the trade,

723
00:37:33,120 --> 00:37:36,720
Speaker 4: errors are non Gaussian. They're not like random that someone

724
00:37:36,760 --> 00:37:40,160
Speaker 4: screws up and something goes very wrong and it only

725
00:37:40,200 --> 00:37:43,000
Speaker 4: takes two people and two different constellations to screw up

726
00:37:43,280 --> 00:37:47,160
Speaker 4: in the right way, as it were, for your algorithms

727
00:37:47,200 --> 00:37:50,600
Speaker 4: to just totally fail and you have a collision. And

728
00:37:50,880 --> 00:37:54,480
Speaker 4: so we've been lucky so far. But I think if

729
00:37:54,480 --> 00:37:56,759
Speaker 4: you up the number of satellites by another factor of

730
00:37:56,760 --> 00:37:59,440
Speaker 4: ten or so, the chances are that we're going to

731
00:37:59,480 --> 00:38:03,320
Speaker 4: start seeing collisions. Space has been quite careful. They're actually

732
00:38:03,400 --> 00:38:07,759
Speaker 4: retiring now about three hundred of their satellites that have

733
00:38:08,080 --> 00:38:11,240
Speaker 4: components that they feel a dodgy and might cause a failure,

734
00:38:11,640 --> 00:38:13,799
Speaker 4: and so they're bringing them down under control while they're

735
00:38:13,800 --> 00:38:17,040
Speaker 4: still working and incinerating them in the atmosphere, which is

736
00:38:17,080 --> 00:38:20,279
Speaker 4: a whole other environmental problem that's just emerging because you know,

737
00:38:20,800 --> 00:38:23,200
Speaker 4: messing with the chemistry the upper atmosphere, what could possibly

738
00:38:23,239 --> 00:38:23,600
Speaker 4: go wrong?

739
00:38:23,719 --> 00:38:25,520
Speaker 1: That's worth trying for us so far.

740
00:38:25,760 --> 00:38:29,400
Speaker 4: Yeah, right, But putting that aside for a second, you know,

741
00:38:29,440 --> 00:38:31,600
Speaker 4: they're trying to be what they feel is responsible bringing

742
00:38:31,600 --> 00:38:34,480
Speaker 4: these satellites down, but not all companies maybe are going

743
00:38:34,560 --> 00:38:37,880
Speaker 4: to do that. And for example, of the first batch

744
00:38:37,920 --> 00:38:41,560
Speaker 4: of can Fan satellites, seventeen of the eighteen have started

745
00:38:41,640 --> 00:38:44,200
Speaker 4: raising the orbits. One of them looks like it may

746
00:38:44,200 --> 00:38:47,120
Speaker 4: have failed in SIH and Tolmerle, which will leave it

747
00:38:47,160 --> 00:38:50,120
Speaker 4: up there for a century. If you're launching ten thousand

748
00:38:50,120 --> 00:38:54,240
Speaker 4: satellites and you have a one percent failure rate, say

749
00:38:54,840 --> 00:38:58,120
Speaker 4: that's one hundred failed satellites added to the mix. And

750
00:38:58,360 --> 00:39:00,520
Speaker 4: you know, so it doesn't take too any of those

751
00:39:00,560 --> 00:39:03,080
Speaker 4: to kind of exacerbate the problems.

752
00:39:03,160 --> 00:39:05,719
Speaker 3: But these companies must be incentivized to solve this problem,

753
00:39:05,800 --> 00:39:08,080
Speaker 3: right They don't want to invest billions in their network

754
00:39:08,120 --> 00:39:10,719
Speaker 3: and then have them all be destroyed. They must be

755
00:39:10,760 --> 00:39:11,520
Speaker 3: clear out about it.

756
00:39:11,760 --> 00:39:14,440
Speaker 4: If anything will save us, that's it. It's the bottom line,

757
00:39:15,160 --> 00:39:17,719
Speaker 4: and it's the used environment story that they will do

758
00:39:18,080 --> 00:39:22,200
Speaker 4: not enough about the problem until it starts getting bad

759
00:39:22,280 --> 00:39:26,719
Speaker 4: enough that they actually see economic losses due to the problem,

760
00:39:26,960 --> 00:39:30,000
Speaker 4: and then they will scramble to self regulate and do

761
00:39:30,080 --> 00:39:31,719
Speaker 4: something that will improve it.

762
00:39:32,239 --> 00:39:34,960
Speaker 1: And on that positive note, let's take a break and

763
00:39:35,040 --> 00:39:54,480
Speaker 1: when we come back, we'll talk about implications for astronomy. Okay,

764
00:39:54,520 --> 00:39:56,880
Speaker 1: so you mentioned a little bit earlier in the show

765
00:39:56,920 --> 00:40:00,520
Speaker 1: that all of the starlink satellites, for example, are making

766
00:40:00,520 --> 00:40:04,520
Speaker 1: astronomy difficult. What is the magnitude of this problem right

767
00:40:04,800 --> 00:40:05,400
Speaker 1: right now?

768
00:40:05,440 --> 00:40:09,480
Speaker 4: It's an annoying nuisance. But again, up things by another

769
00:40:09,480 --> 00:40:12,440
Speaker 4: factor of ten, and it becomes really difficult to do

770
00:40:12,480 --> 00:40:14,759
Speaker 4: certain kinds of science. And so the problem is this,

771
00:40:14,840 --> 00:40:17,719
Speaker 4: there are two problems. They're different for lower bit satellites

772
00:40:17,760 --> 00:40:21,360
Speaker 4: and high orbit satellites. For low orbit satellites they're so

773
00:40:21,480 --> 00:40:23,200
Speaker 4: low that in the middle of the night they can't

774
00:40:23,239 --> 00:40:25,360
Speaker 4: see the sun. They shine by your affected light, and

775
00:40:25,400 --> 00:40:27,160
Speaker 4: so they're dark, and so they're not really a problem

776
00:40:27,200 --> 00:40:29,880
Speaker 4: for astronomers in the middle of the night. They are. However,

777
00:40:29,960 --> 00:40:31,960
Speaker 4: if you have enough of them. For example, if this

778
00:40:32,200 --> 00:40:35,759
Speaker 4: espace company I mentioned really launches like one hundred thousand satellites,

779
00:40:36,160 --> 00:40:39,360
Speaker 4: you could get to a situation where there are more

780
00:40:39,560 --> 00:40:43,240
Speaker 4: visible satellites in the sky than visible stars.

781
00:40:43,520 --> 00:40:44,040
Speaker 3: Oh my god.

782
00:40:44,239 --> 00:40:48,240
Speaker 4: Especially like just at the limit of visibility, the sky

783
00:40:48,440 --> 00:40:50,400
Speaker 4: instead of being nice and dark, will be kind of

784
00:40:50,600 --> 00:40:54,239
Speaker 4: seething in this nauseous way. And then the brighter ones

785
00:40:54,280 --> 00:40:56,440
Speaker 4: will make it very hard to kind of recognize the

786
00:40:56,480 --> 00:40:58,920
Speaker 4: constellations because it's going to be so much traffic. It's

787
00:40:58,960 --> 00:41:01,120
Speaker 4: going to be like in the flight plat hat a know,

788
00:41:01,239 --> 00:41:02,360
Speaker 4: logan airport or whatever.

789
00:41:02,680 --> 00:41:04,520
Speaker 3: But why these things bright? I mean, they don't have

790
00:41:04,600 --> 00:41:06,719
Speaker 3: lights on them, right, are they just reflecting the sun.

791
00:41:06,880 --> 00:41:09,960
Speaker 4: They reflect sunlight, and they're big. They're big and low

792
00:41:10,000 --> 00:41:13,960
Speaker 4: and they reflect sunlight. The current Starlink satellites are thirty

793
00:41:14,040 --> 00:41:17,799
Speaker 4: meter span Oh my god, panels. They're not small. These

794
00:41:17,800 --> 00:41:21,879
Speaker 4: are not tiny CubeSats. They're one ton ish satellites. So

795
00:41:21,920 --> 00:41:25,240
Speaker 4: it's it's really a change in the environment for everyone

796
00:41:25,280 --> 00:41:27,080
Speaker 4: in the world, right, even if you're not a space

797
00:41:27,120 --> 00:41:29,560
Speaker 4: faring country, but you're like looking up at the sky,

798
00:41:29,760 --> 00:41:32,440
Speaker 4: you maybe have cultural connections to the sky, and now

799
00:41:32,480 --> 00:41:35,880
Speaker 4: suddenly you're seeing the sky changing. And one of my

800
00:41:35,920 --> 00:41:38,919
Speaker 4: colleagues was just out hiking in the wilds of Canada said,

801
00:41:38,960 --> 00:41:41,960
Speaker 4: you know, they saw like so many satellites now that

802
00:41:42,000 --> 00:41:43,480
Speaker 4: they would never have seen it a few years ago.

803
00:41:43,560 --> 00:41:46,600
Speaker 3: Can they do something on the satellites to reduce the reflectivity,

804
00:41:46,680 --> 00:41:49,120
Speaker 3: like have an anti reflective coating or a sunshade.

805
00:41:49,280 --> 00:41:51,839
Speaker 4: To SpaceX's credit, they are doing a number of things

806
00:41:51,920 --> 00:41:54,319
Speaker 4: that have reduced the brightness of the satellite. But then

807
00:41:54,360 --> 00:41:56,439
Speaker 4: they came up with this new model of satellite where

808
00:41:56,480 --> 00:41:59,279
Speaker 4: they had these fancy new mitigations, but they were also

809
00:41:59,360 --> 00:42:02,960
Speaker 4: twice as big, so it kind of canceled out. To

810
00:42:03,040 --> 00:42:05,239
Speaker 4: their credit, they've done a lot of work, but there's

811
00:42:05,239 --> 00:42:07,799
Speaker 4: still more that needs to be done. So then the

812
00:42:07,800 --> 00:42:10,879
Speaker 4: second problem is the high orbit satellites. They are too

813
00:42:11,000 --> 00:42:13,600
Speaker 4: faint because they're high up, they're too faint to be

814
00:42:13,640 --> 00:42:16,040
Speaker 4: seen by the average person looking at in the evening

815
00:42:16,440 --> 00:42:21,640
Speaker 4: of the constellations, but they leave trails on astronomical images,

816
00:42:21,880 --> 00:42:24,319
Speaker 4: and they're way way brighter than the distant galaxies that

817
00:42:24,360 --> 00:42:27,160
Speaker 4: we're looking at. And so you take this picture of

818
00:42:27,200 --> 00:42:29,120
Speaker 4: some you know, distant galaxy and you've got a big

819
00:42:29,160 --> 00:42:32,520
Speaker 4: streak going across the image, and you know, we're not

820
00:42:32,560 --> 00:42:34,720
Speaker 4: just trying to take pretty pictures. We're trying to measure

821
00:42:34,880 --> 00:42:38,160
Speaker 4: brightnesses of stars to like one or two percent accuracy,

822
00:42:39,080 --> 00:42:42,279
Speaker 4: and so just photoshopping out the trail doesn't entirely solve

823
00:42:42,280 --> 00:42:46,040
Speaker 4: the problem. And even if that works, if you have

824
00:42:46,120 --> 00:42:48,239
Speaker 4: one trail every five images, you do what we call

825
00:42:48,320 --> 00:42:51,400
Speaker 4: medium filtering. Basically you throw away the bad ones and

826
00:42:51,480 --> 00:42:53,520
Speaker 4: you just have to observe for longer than you otherwise

827
00:42:53,520 --> 00:42:56,960
Speaker 4: would have. So it's attacks, but it's workable. But then

828
00:42:57,000 --> 00:42:58,840
Speaker 4: you know, if you up the number right so that

829
00:42:58,920 --> 00:43:03,160
Speaker 4: it's like streaks on every image going crisscrossing, going every way,

830
00:43:03,719 --> 00:43:07,959
Speaker 4: that becomes pretty impossible to analyze in an automated way.

831
00:43:08,040 --> 00:43:10,160
Speaker 4: If you have, like you know, ten thousand images of

832
00:43:10,200 --> 00:43:13,560
Speaker 4: galaxies and you're trying to analyze them remote with an algorithm,

833
00:43:14,040 --> 00:43:17,640
Speaker 4: and trying to distinguish between the crisscrossing satellite streaks and

834
00:43:17,840 --> 00:43:22,000
Speaker 4: actual astronomical phenomena is going to get pretty impossible. You know,

835
00:43:22,040 --> 00:43:24,239
Speaker 4: there are some science that's going to be affected worse

836
00:43:24,280 --> 00:43:28,960
Speaker 4: than others. The Magellanic clouds our nearest galaxies are visible

837
00:43:29,640 --> 00:43:34,440
Speaker 4: high in the southern sky in southern Midsummer. Southern midsummer

838
00:43:34,520 --> 00:43:37,479
Speaker 4: is the worst for this because that's when the sun

839
00:43:37,520 --> 00:43:40,520
Speaker 4: isn't that far below the horizon. The satellites get illuminated

840
00:43:40,560 --> 00:43:44,759
Speaker 4: all night long, and in plausible scenarios five or ten

841
00:43:44,840 --> 00:43:49,399
Speaker 4: years from now, there are several thousand illuminated satellites all

842
00:43:49,440 --> 00:43:53,920
Speaker 4: the time in the sky throughout the night in midsummer.

843
00:43:54,120 --> 00:43:56,200
Speaker 4: We may be able to work around it with new

844
00:43:56,320 --> 00:44:00,560
Speaker 4: kinds of cameras that can turn their shutters off for

845
00:44:00,680 --> 00:44:03,800
Speaker 4: brief modes of time while the satellite is passing, triggered

846
00:44:03,840 --> 00:44:06,719
Speaker 4: maybe by a finer camera that spots the satellite coming over.

847
00:44:07,280 --> 00:44:10,400
Speaker 4: It's not trivial. That's money, right, that's money that we

848
00:44:10,480 --> 00:44:13,040
Speaker 4: don't have to re equip the observer trees.

849
00:44:13,680 --> 00:44:16,680
Speaker 3: So Musk said, quote, I am confident that we will

850
00:44:16,719 --> 00:44:21,800
Speaker 3: not cause any impact whatsoever in astronomical discoveries zero. How

851
00:44:21,880 --> 00:44:23,880
Speaker 3: confident are you that that's the case.

852
00:44:24,000 --> 00:44:26,359
Speaker 4: I am one hundred percent confident that he is wrong

853
00:44:26,400 --> 00:44:31,920
Speaker 4: about that. Okay, there are subtleties, right, and so for example,

854
00:44:32,320 --> 00:44:35,000
Speaker 4: there was a report of a flare in a red

855
00:44:35,000 --> 00:44:38,799
Speaker 4: shift eleven galaxy that was super scientifically exciting until it

856
00:44:38,800 --> 00:44:40,920
Speaker 4: turned out to be actually a satellite passing through the

857
00:44:40,920 --> 00:44:43,560
Speaker 4: field of view the telescope at the time. If you've

858
00:44:43,600 --> 00:44:46,000
Speaker 4: just got like an optical fiber on the sky that

859
00:44:46,040 --> 00:44:49,320
Speaker 4: you're taking a spectrum, right, you don't have an image

860
00:44:49,320 --> 00:44:51,319
Speaker 4: of the sky, it's hard to figure out that that

861
00:44:51,440 --> 00:44:54,360
Speaker 4: was a satellite. So there's all kinds of ways in

862
00:44:54,400 --> 00:44:57,520
Speaker 4: which this is like a new kind of contamination factor

863
00:44:58,200 --> 00:45:03,960
Speaker 4: that ranges from mild annoying to oh, we accidentally published

864
00:45:04,000 --> 00:45:08,000
Speaker 4: a wrong exciting result because there was no way to

865
00:45:08,080 --> 00:45:10,640
Speaker 4: tell that it was caused by satellite contamination.

866
00:45:10,920 --> 00:45:12,799
Speaker 3: So if you were a dictator of the Earth and

867
00:45:12,840 --> 00:45:14,440
Speaker 3: you were in charge of this and everybody had to

868
00:45:14,440 --> 00:45:17,759
Speaker 3: follow your instructions, what would you do to allow us

869
00:45:17,800 --> 00:45:22,080
Speaker 3: to have this amazing space technology and worldwide network and

870
00:45:22,120 --> 00:45:23,160
Speaker 3: also do astronomy.

871
00:45:23,760 --> 00:45:26,560
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's the challenge. I think we just need a

872
00:45:26,680 --> 00:45:30,240
Speaker 4: cat on the number of active satellites of a given

873
00:45:30,280 --> 00:45:33,960
Speaker 4: brightness at a given altitude. You know, we have caps already,

874
00:45:34,080 --> 00:45:37,240
Speaker 4: Like in geostationary orbit, there's orbital slots that get assigned

875
00:45:37,239 --> 00:45:40,680
Speaker 4: by the International Telecommunications Union. You can't just launch as

876
00:45:40,680 --> 00:45:44,080
Speaker 4: many geostationary satellites as you like. I think we're going

877
00:45:44,160 --> 00:45:45,719
Speaker 4: to have to go to that. In lower th orbit,

878
00:45:45,719 --> 00:45:47,320
Speaker 4: We're going to have to have some kind of orbital

879
00:45:47,360 --> 00:45:50,600
Speaker 4: slot thing, and that will then change the design trade

880
00:45:50,680 --> 00:45:54,800
Speaker 4: so that instead of launching ten thousand small satellites, maybe

881
00:45:54,800 --> 00:45:58,359
Speaker 4: you launched one thousand bigger satellites and that helps with

882
00:45:58,640 --> 00:46:01,480
Speaker 4: not bumping into each other as well. So I think

883
00:46:01,600 --> 00:46:08,040
Speaker 4: it's a matter of finding regulation that will yes, absolutely

884
00:46:08,960 --> 00:46:13,879
Speaker 4: let the space technology develop, but not in a complete

885
00:46:14,200 --> 00:46:18,000
Speaker 4: free for all way, and manage the resources that we

886
00:46:18,160 --> 00:46:20,759
Speaker 4: have in a sustainable way and in a way that

887
00:46:20,880 --> 00:46:25,160
Speaker 4: doesn't impact the environment and astronomy more than a certain amount.

888
00:46:25,160 --> 00:46:27,000
Speaker 4: And where I mean absolutely it's going to be worse

889
00:46:27,000 --> 00:46:30,000
Speaker 4: for us than it used to be. But I do

890
00:46:30,120 --> 00:46:33,080
Speaker 4: believe there's a happy medium where the astronomers could just

891
00:46:33,120 --> 00:46:35,839
Speaker 4: about kind of survive and the satellites can still make

892
00:46:35,880 --> 00:46:36,800
Speaker 4: bunches of money.

893
00:46:37,160 --> 00:46:39,399
Speaker 1: So let's wrap up the show by asking the two

894
00:46:39,480 --> 00:46:42,960
Speaker 1: questions that we got from a listener. So Josh sent

895
00:46:43,040 --> 00:46:43,960
Speaker 1: us two questions.

896
00:46:44,239 --> 00:46:48,400
Speaker 5: Here we go, Besides the stuff that just orbits the Earth,

897
00:46:49,040 --> 00:46:52,920
Speaker 5: what happens to all the other stuff? Does it just

898
00:46:53,040 --> 00:46:57,600
Speaker 5: go off into space, run into planets, moons and stars?

899
00:46:58,560 --> 00:47:02,160
Speaker 5: And parenthetically thinking that if they do hit planets and moons,

900
00:47:02,440 --> 00:47:06,080
Speaker 5: they just sit there forever, and if they hit stars,

901
00:47:06,239 --> 00:47:08,080
Speaker 5: I'm assuming they melt away.

902
00:47:08,680 --> 00:47:10,480
Speaker 4: Right Well, even if they hit a planet, you know,

903
00:47:10,600 --> 00:47:13,319
Speaker 4: the typical planet hitting speed is going to be more

904
00:47:13,320 --> 00:47:16,880
Speaker 4: than enough to pulbarize you. We have, in addition to

905
00:47:16,960 --> 00:47:20,840
Speaker 4: the twenty five something thousand objects currently in orbit, the

906
00:47:20,920 --> 00:47:24,000
Speaker 4: sixty thousand objects that have been in orbit since Futnik,

907
00:47:24,600 --> 00:47:28,040
Speaker 4: there's about one to two thousand objects that we have

908
00:47:28,160 --> 00:47:32,160
Speaker 4: sent beyond Earth orbit, either to the Moon or into

909
00:47:32,280 --> 00:47:35,480
Speaker 4: orbit around the Sun. And they're poorly documented. I've been

910
00:47:35,480 --> 00:47:38,160
Speaker 4: trying to make a catalog of them, figure out where

911
00:47:38,160 --> 00:47:40,640
Speaker 4: they all are. Most of them will just orbit the

912
00:47:40,680 --> 00:47:43,920
Speaker 4: Sun forever, I say, forever. After a million years, there

913
00:47:43,920 --> 00:47:46,320
Speaker 4: are various effects that will cause them, probably the spiral

914
00:47:46,360 --> 00:47:48,640
Speaker 4: into the Sun or to hit a planet. But you

915
00:47:48,680 --> 00:47:51,799
Speaker 4: know we're talking million year timescales. These things are going

916
00:47:51,800 --> 00:47:53,880
Speaker 4: to be out there for a while, unless you know,

917
00:47:53,920 --> 00:47:56,560
Speaker 4: the Smithsonian goes and clangs them or something.

918
00:47:56,400 --> 00:47:57,720
Speaker 1: With their gigantic budget.

919
00:47:58,000 --> 00:48:00,600
Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, you know, a thousand years from hopefully it

920
00:48:00,600 --> 00:48:03,319
Speaker 4: will have ejective or one hundred thousand years from now.

921
00:48:04,200 --> 00:48:06,600
Speaker 4: We do have stuff in orbit around Mars. We have

922
00:48:06,680 --> 00:48:09,640
Speaker 4: stuff in orbit around Jupiter, and we have stuff on

923
00:48:09,680 --> 00:48:10,760
Speaker 4: the surface of the planets.

924
00:48:11,160 --> 00:48:14,040
Speaker 3: Stuff you mean on purpose or space junk or both.

925
00:48:13,920 --> 00:48:17,120
Speaker 4: Well, both, right, So we try not to have the

926
00:48:17,160 --> 00:48:21,120
Speaker 4: space junk hit Mars because and so what we do

927
00:48:21,239 --> 00:48:23,520
Speaker 4: is when we send stuff out in the direction of Mars,

928
00:48:24,000 --> 00:48:27,560
Speaker 4: we actually sterilize the probe, sort of bake it so

929
00:48:27,680 --> 00:48:29,719
Speaker 4: that there's hopefully no bacteria on it, so that we

930
00:48:29,760 --> 00:48:34,640
Speaker 4: won't contaminate the search for Martian life with bugs from Florida.

931
00:48:35,280 --> 00:48:38,279
Speaker 4: And then when we launch it, we actually deliberately aim

932
00:48:38,320 --> 00:48:41,080
Speaker 4: it away from Mars a little bit. We deliberately miss

933
00:48:41,080 --> 00:48:44,040
Speaker 4: a bit separate from the rocket stage. So now the

934
00:48:44,120 --> 00:48:46,320
Speaker 4: rocket stage is in an orbit that doesn't go close

935
00:48:46,360 --> 00:48:50,160
Speaker 4: to Mars, and then we make a course correction to

936
00:48:50,160 --> 00:48:52,920
Speaker 4: put the probe on course from Mars, and so that

937
00:48:53,000 --> 00:48:56,680
Speaker 4: way we avoid having the big sort of space junk

938
00:48:56,680 --> 00:48:59,520
Speaker 4: pieces that we launch an orbit around the Sun hit

939
00:48:59,680 --> 00:49:02,600
Speaker 4: Mars at least on the first time round. You can't

940
00:49:02,640 --> 00:49:04,959
Speaker 4: sort of predict far enough in advance to guarantee it'll

941
00:49:04,960 --> 00:49:07,640
Speaker 4: never hit, but hopefully the buzz will be done by then.

942
00:49:08,000 --> 00:49:09,759
Speaker 4: So that is, you know, this whole issue of you know,

943
00:49:09,800 --> 00:49:13,080
Speaker 4: protecting the environment of the other planets is certainly something

944
00:49:13,160 --> 00:49:15,520
Speaker 4: that people give a lot of thought to, but there is, Yeah,

945
00:49:15,560 --> 00:49:18,400
Speaker 4: there's a bunch of junk orbiting the Sun. One of

946
00:49:18,400 --> 00:49:21,160
Speaker 4: the things that I've been involved in is movement to

947
00:49:21,239 --> 00:49:24,960
Speaker 4: try and regulate this better and at least get people

948
00:49:25,000 --> 00:49:27,560
Speaker 4: to say what orbit they put their junk in so

949
00:49:27,600 --> 00:49:30,680
Speaker 4: that we can find it later. Occasionally we've accidentally catalog

950
00:49:30,760 --> 00:49:34,799
Speaker 4: space junk. Is, oh, we discovered an asteroid, and then well,

951
00:49:35,200 --> 00:49:37,759
Speaker 4: never mind that asteroid is on an asteroid, it's a

952
00:49:37,840 --> 00:49:40,880
Speaker 4: rocket stage. We would like you please, if you launch

953
00:49:40,920 --> 00:49:43,640
Speaker 4: something in the orbit around the Sun, give us the

954
00:49:43,760 --> 00:49:47,080
Speaker 4: orbital elements so that we can you know, disambiguate it

955
00:49:47,120 --> 00:49:50,759
Speaker 4: from asteroids. There's an asteroid mining company that's explicitly said

956
00:49:50,760 --> 00:49:53,360
Speaker 4: it wants to launch this survey probe next year and

957
00:49:53,400 --> 00:49:55,239
Speaker 4: they're not going to tell us which asteroid is going

958
00:49:55,239 --> 00:49:58,880
Speaker 4: to because that's proprietary information. Right. I think that's just

959
00:49:58,960 --> 00:50:02,040
Speaker 4: not okay. If you're flying a light plane in the US,

960
00:50:02,040 --> 00:50:03,440
Speaker 4: you have to file a flight plan. You should have

961
00:50:03,520 --> 00:50:05,840
Speaker 4: a file a flight plan. If you go to the asteroids,

962
00:50:06,560 --> 00:50:10,400
Speaker 4: that's public interest information. And so the American Astronomical Society

963
00:50:10,400 --> 00:50:14,000
Speaker 4: has issued a statement saying that we think that interplanetary

964
00:50:14,080 --> 00:50:16,840
Speaker 4: orbits like we're like those solar systems are area and

965
00:50:17,040 --> 00:50:18,520
Speaker 4: if you're going to be in it, we think you

966
00:50:18,560 --> 00:50:22,640
Speaker 4: should publish your orbital data and not keep it secret.

967
00:50:22,719 --> 00:50:25,120
Speaker 4: So we'll see if we can make that stick. But

968
00:50:25,320 --> 00:50:29,080
Speaker 4: that's going to be an area of discussion in the

969
00:50:29,160 --> 00:50:31,880
Speaker 4: years to come as more and more activity. You know,

970
00:50:31,920 --> 00:50:35,040
Speaker 4: it used to be that the deep space arena was

971
00:50:35,440 --> 00:50:40,839
Speaker 4: just NASA, JPL and the Soviets, right, and now it's

972
00:50:40,920 --> 00:50:44,440
Speaker 4: all kinds of developing countries. The UAE has a Mars orbiter,

973
00:50:44,920 --> 00:50:49,560
Speaker 4: India has a Moon Landers and private companies like SpaceX

974
00:50:50,000 --> 00:50:53,319
Speaker 4: are launching stuff to the Moon and Mars and so

975
00:50:53,400 --> 00:50:55,880
Speaker 4: we really need to do a better job of keeping

976
00:50:55,920 --> 00:50:57,000
Speaker 4: track of what's out there.

977
00:50:57,160 --> 00:50:59,480
Speaker 1: Yeah, And speaking of keeping track of what's out there,

978
00:50:59,560 --> 00:51:01,800
Speaker 1: Josh is the second question is right on point there.

979
00:51:02,320 --> 00:51:05,560
Speaker 5: This is probably more speculative and harder to answer. But

980
00:51:05,719 --> 00:51:10,600
Speaker 5: in the event of the existence of advanced extraterrestrial beings,

981
00:51:11,080 --> 00:51:14,719
Speaker 5: what might they into it about us? If or when

982
00:51:14,800 --> 00:51:19,440
Speaker 5: they do find the random fastener or rocket booster or

983
00:51:19,520 --> 00:51:24,760
Speaker 5: humanoid poop? Would they be curious? Would they be bored?

984
00:51:25,480 --> 00:51:28,920
Speaker 5: Would they be disappointed? We were so wasteful with the

985
00:51:28,960 --> 00:51:32,320
Speaker 5: stuff we ejected into the space trash can.

986
00:51:33,160 --> 00:51:36,000
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think they're out of you is going to

987
00:51:36,080 --> 00:51:38,800
Speaker 4: be well, what those guys went extinct?

988
00:51:43,640 --> 00:51:46,160
Speaker 1: Well, I'm hoping our clean up methods really get much

989
00:51:46,200 --> 00:51:47,520
Speaker 1: better in the coming decades.

990
00:51:47,680 --> 00:51:48,600
Speaker 4: Yep, you and me both.

991
00:51:48,760 --> 00:51:49,880
Speaker 1: Yeah, fingers crossed.

992
00:51:50,400 --> 00:51:52,600
Speaker 3: Have we had elements of space junk that we think

993
00:51:52,640 --> 00:51:56,400
Speaker 3: have gone interstellar, that have left the Solar System? You know,

994
00:51:56,440 --> 00:51:59,160
Speaker 3: basically the inverse version of Abilobe's omuamua.

995
00:51:59,640 --> 00:52:03,400
Speaker 4: Yep. Absolutely. There are a couple of pieces of the

996
00:52:03,440 --> 00:52:07,640
Speaker 4: New Horizons probe, one of the rocket stages, and a

997
00:52:07,680 --> 00:52:10,759
Speaker 4: couple of there are things called d spin weights that

998
00:52:10,840 --> 00:52:13,120
Speaker 4: are like you have a spinning rocket stage, you want

999
00:52:13,160 --> 00:52:17,560
Speaker 4: to slow it down, you unspool two weights on a wire,

1000
00:52:17,800 --> 00:52:19,960
Speaker 4: kind of like a yo yo kind of thing, and

1001
00:52:20,000 --> 00:52:22,080
Speaker 4: then they float off and take the angle the momentum

1002
00:52:22,080 --> 00:52:25,800
Speaker 4: with them. And so that's like another class of space jungle.

1003
00:52:25,840 --> 00:52:28,120
Speaker 4: That's like little pieces of space chapment. Just okay, they're

1004
00:52:28,120 --> 00:52:30,359
Speaker 4: on their way out the Solar system, all right.

1005
00:52:30,400 --> 00:52:33,640
Speaker 1: So to wrap up, are you feeling optimistic about the future?

1006
00:52:33,920 --> 00:52:36,200
Speaker 1: Are we going to get those caps on satellites? What

1007
00:52:36,200 --> 00:52:36,880
Speaker 1: do you think.

1008
00:52:36,880 --> 00:52:37,920
Speaker 3: Before we go extinct?

1009
00:52:38,239 --> 00:52:38,640
Speaker 1: Yeah?

1010
00:52:38,719 --> 00:52:42,160
Speaker 4: I don't know, Kelly. I think that there is you know,

1011
00:52:42,239 --> 00:52:44,120
Speaker 4: even in the companies, right, I don't want to paint

1012
00:52:44,120 --> 00:52:47,239
Speaker 4: them as unfeeling corporate. You know, money is a little thing.

1013
00:52:47,320 --> 00:52:50,399
Speaker 4: They do care about space, and so I think there

1014
00:52:50,520 --> 00:52:54,440
Speaker 4: is interest in being responsible space citizens, and that, you know,

1015
00:52:54,560 --> 00:52:57,279
Speaker 4: gets balanced against all the pressures that are pushing them

1016
00:52:57,320 --> 00:53:00,319
Speaker 4: to be careless. And so I think it could go

1017
00:53:00,360 --> 00:53:03,040
Speaker 4: either way. It's the usual environmental thing. It will get

1018
00:53:03,200 --> 00:53:06,160
Speaker 4: bad enough that something will have to be done, and

1019
00:53:06,160 --> 00:53:08,440
Speaker 4: then there'll be a scramble to try and fix in.

1020
00:53:09,000 --> 00:53:11,719
Speaker 1: I think that's a very realistic take on things, all right.

1021
00:53:11,840 --> 00:53:13,759
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for being here. Today, Jonathan, we

1022
00:53:13,840 --> 00:53:14,360
Speaker 1: had a lot.

1023
00:53:14,200 --> 00:53:16,440
Speaker 4: Of fun hide Vice. Thank you for having me, good

1024
00:53:16,480 --> 00:53:17,440
Speaker 4: luck tracking everything.

1025
00:53:17,760 --> 00:53:21,720
Speaker 3: Thank you and listeners. If your planning to launch anything

1026
00:53:21,760 --> 00:53:23,880
Speaker 3: in order to please please let Jonathan know.

1027
00:53:31,400 --> 00:53:35,239
Speaker 1: Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We

1028
00:53:35,280 --> 00:53:37,680
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1029
00:53:37,840 --> 00:53:40,480
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1030
00:53:40,480 --> 00:53:42,480
Speaker 3: this Extraordinary Universe.

1031
00:53:42,600 --> 00:53:45,560
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1032
00:53:45,560 --> 00:53:48,560
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1033
00:53:48,600 --> 00:53:49,040
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1034
00:53:49,239 --> 00:53:52,719
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1035
00:53:52,800 --> 00:53:55,600
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1036
00:53:55,440 --> 00:53:57,279
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1037
00:53:57,320 --> 00:54:02,040
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1038
00:54:02,040 --> 00:54:04,960
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1039
00:54:05,120 --> 00:54:06,640
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