![]() ![]() I’ll admit, I teared up listening to David Bowie as the rockets separated from the payload. Like everyone, I marveled at the successful launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, whose cargo included Elon Musk’s Tesla Roaster and a mannequin driver named Starman. China and Russia each have dozens of decommissioned satellites overhead, though the US certainly does it with style. It’s not just Americans doing the dumping. And that collision, then, would hatch its own spectacle of shrapnel, which would join the rushing river of junk already circling the planet. All of them pose dangers for future astronauts: One plum-sized piece of gnarled space trash traveling faster than a speeding bullet could rip a five-foot hole into a spacecraft. At least 200 objects roar back into the atmosphere each year, including pieces of solar panels and antennas and fragments of metal. This debris will pose a navigation hazard for many centuries to come. Size doesn’t always matter-a fleck of paint, orbiting at a high velocity, cracked the Space Shuttle's windshield. Old satellites, like Tiangong-1, are the biggest and highest-profile lumps of rubbish, but most of it comes from rocket parts and even lost astronaut tools. That includes 20,000 pieces larger than a softball, and 500,000 about the size of a marble, according to NASA. As many as 170 million fragments of metal and astro debris necklace Earth. We curdle lakes with toxic chemicals, contaminate the atmosphere with climate-altering carbon dioxide, and heave so much plastic into the oceans that by 2050 experts think there will be more plastic than fish in the sea. The news, and the junk, seemed to be everywhere, following me throughout life.Īlready on Earth, we discard tens of millions of tons of electronics each year. A decade later, when I was living in Japan, a Chinese satellite collided with a NASA rocket. As a sophomore in college, it was part of my environmental politics class. Space junk was the debate topic my senior year of high school, and my teammates spent the year mapping out arguments for all the ways errant satellites could cause space agency turmoil, political unrest, and human casualties. Our solution: an enormous net, connected to an Earth-based, rocket-powered launching and landing system. That year, three friends and I mapped the probable timeline and implications of all the broken bits of dead spacecraft and orbital clutter, writing scenarios about how all that garbage would eventually make it difficult to launch new satellites. ![]() ![]() Space junk was the topic of my middle school futurists' society challenge. All rights reserved.Amy Webb ( is a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business and is the chief executive of the Future Today Institute, a strategic foresight and research group in Washington, D.C. Watch a fold-by-fold video of the origaBEAMi being built and inflated at collectSPACE.įollow on Facebook and on Twitter at collectSPACE. Future inflatable modules, such as those now being designed by Bigelow Aerospace, could be used to establish standalone space stations and habitats for deep space vehicles. Otherwise, the hatches between the Tranquility node and BEAM will remain closed for the duration of the trial period.Īccording to NASA, this first test of an expandable module will gauge how well the habitat performs and specifically, how well it protects against solar radiation, debris and the temperature extremes of space. The outpost's residents are slated to re-enter the module several during the next two years to collect sensor data and assess the conditions inside the expanded room. "Have fun and be sure to learn more about BEAM and ISS research and technology!" promotes NASA on its website.Īboard the space station, Williams and his crewmates are scheduled to enter the BEAM for the first time on Thursday (June 2). The agency also posted a five-minute video that shows the origaBEAMi being shaped and expanded. ![]() "Fold with precision and accuracy," NASA instructs, "or risk a leak in your habitation module. The illustrated crew procedures guide those building the model through each of the two dozen folds. (Image credit: NASA)įirst though, the origami model needs to be folded using a two-sided template that reproduces the exterior look of the fabric BEAM. The "origaBEAMi" is free to download from NASA’s website. Like the real thing on the space station, NASA's origami model of the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) is inflated after its assembly. ![]()
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