What If We Trashed Earth's Orbit With Space Junk?

With every rocket we launch into the earth's orbit, we are trapping ourselves on our planet.

Almost everything that we've launched into space ends up either falling down and burning up in the atmosphere. or getting cought in the earth's lower orbit for thousands of years.

The Earth's lower orbit is surrounded by just 200kg of small, rocky debris in the form of meteoroids. But it's also got a belt of about 3 million kg of space junk .

20,000 pieces of debris as large as softball, 50,000 pieces of debris as larger than a marble and many millions of pieces of debris too small to track are orbating Earth

What makes these floating parts of old satellites and spent rocket bodies so dangerous? it's speed they move at this junk is hurting through space at a speed of 8km/s at that speed, one small bolt is enough to shatter a working satellite into hundreds of pieces. But it's what comes next that could hold off our dreams of building moon bases, colonizing mars, and any space exploration whatsoever. the more junk we leave uncontrolled in the Earth's lower orbit, the harder it is not to get hit by it. Things are runnnig into each other. Fragments of debris are collidding and breaking up, multiplying the number of items flying through the space junkyard and they're hitting working spacecraft too. one day they could hit enough satellites to iniate an unstoppable, destructive chain reaction.

(image of chain reaction).

The cascade of collisions would make our lower orbit so congested with man-made debris, that eventually there would be no active spacecraft left. Everything in the Earth's orbit would be turned into a deadly wall of celestial scrap. near earth space would become unusable. no rockets could be safely launched untill we cleaned up the orbit. we'de have to put our space missions on pause, and we'de be trapped on the planet for generations.

What would it be like?

Well, the debris belt wouldn't rain down on Earth and cause massive destruction. space rubbish would disintegrate in the atmossphere before it reached our planet's surface.but the colllisions would produce a lot of dust. that dust, illuminated by sunlight, would cause an ever-present twilight on the planet. with this form of pollution, you'de forget what nights used to look like.

What's even more unpleasent- all ofour satellite netwroks would go down. there'de be no sateliite communications, no gps navigation, no weather data, and no way to do any science in the Earth's orbit.

You have to go back to paper maps, and get your cash out.

Resources: pixabay

Welcome to the 1970s. on a positive note, science has already come up with a few ideas for cleaning up our lower orbit mess. they're loking at capturing space debris with a net, or harpoon, or vaporizing the small bits of junk with lasers. whatever action we deploy, we should act quick if we want to launch humanity on far space missions and finally colonize that red planet.