In This Economy?

DISCLAIMER: I sterilized this post with about a quart of antibacterial cleanser, so you don’t have to worry about contracting Swine Flu from reading it. The virus is, after all, spread by blogs. And tweets.

The Earth has a problem and it’s called space junk.

But what is space junk?

Is it millions of pairs of Truck Nuts that have been launched into space? I wish. No, actually it’s debris from satellites, space stations and shuttles that has been accumulating in our orbit for the past 40+ years. It’s an unchecked collection of trash that is spinning around our planet like some sort of Saturn-esque ring of refuse. As a matter of fact, if we don’t do anything about this problem the Earth could, according to something I’m making up right now:

“…look exactly like Saturn in, like, 6 or 7 years. Except, instead of gas or rocks or whatever Saturn’s ring is made of, ours will be made of trash. It’ll be a dump ring. A big, gross ring of dump.”

In all seriousness though, this space junk problem can have some major implications on the future of space travel if left alone. Right now there are about 300,000 small pieces of junk floating around in our orbit. And by small I’m talking in the ballpark of one centimeter. I know that may not seem like much but when you consider that about 25 years ago there was only a quarter of that up there, you can see that the problem is growing.

So how do we fix it?

There are a few options:

1. We can just leave the 300,000 pieces of currently orbiting space junk up there and focus on implementing procedures to lessen the amount of space junk left behind in the future. Lame.

2. We can create some sort of garbage truck/bulldozer/space shuttle hybrid and get up there and start taking a bite out of the existing space trash accumulation. Kind of awesome.

3. We can create a ground based laser which can be fired into a pocket of space trash, disintegrating it into a tiny cloud of dust. Fucking awesome!

So the only question that remains is when do we start? The answer to this one is probably not for a while. Ground based lasers cost money. Lots of it. And right now, in this economy, our money is tied up in a few other things.

So, alas, our space junk problem lives on.

Tags: lasers, space junk, Swine Flu, trash, twitter

This entry was posted on Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 10:29 AM and is filed under Bad News, WTF. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.