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How did so much junk get up in space? How can we clean it up? How is it making light pollution worse? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!

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Music by Jason Grady and Nick Bain. Thanks to Cathy Rinella for editing.

Hosted by Paul M. Sutter, astrophysicist and the one and only Agent to the Stars (http://www.pmsutter.com).

 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION (AUTO-GENERATED)

the United States Border Patrol has exciting and rewarding career opportunities with the nation's largest law enforcement organization. Border Patrol agents enjoy great pay, outstanding federal benefits and up to $20,000 in recruitment incentives. If you are looking for a way to serve something greater than yourself, consider the US Border Patrol. Learn more online at CBP dot gov slash careers slash USB P That's CBP dot gov slash careers slash USB P on April 24th, 1996. The Ballistic Mission Defense Organization, which some branch of the US government that I've never heard about before and officially doesn't exist anymore. But that's not the point of the story anyway. In 96 they used a Delta two rocket to launch a a little space experiment. It was a satellite to monitor infrared mission in space.

One year later, Lottie Williams was minding her own business, taking a walk in a park in her hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. She saw a flash of light in the sky like a meteor, and it was pretty cool. And then she felt it. A six inch long piece of fiberglass and aluminum hit her shoulder. It wasn't traveling very quickly as it was very thin and the atmosphere slowed it down, but it still stung. Moments later, the second stage of the Delta two rocket used to launch the infrared mission, crashed into the ground a couple 100 miles away in Texas. 1983. NASA Mission STS seven. This was the second flight of the Challenger space shuttle, and the crew included Sally Ride, NASA's first female astronaut. While in orbit. A tiny fleck of paint so small you could barely see it struck one of the windows. It left a tiny impact crater about a millimeter wide.

In 1994 a tiny piece of debris struck space shuttle Endeavor digging itself halfway through a window. In 2006, a piece of a circuit board shot a hole straight through the space shuttle Atlantis radiator panels. In 2009, the Iridium company, which manages a fleet of communication satellites, received an alert that one of their satellites was approaching within a dangerous distance of another satellite, a £2100 Russian military communications satellite. Cosmos 2251. The company receives about 400 such alerts every week, and calculations showed that their Iridium 33 satellite would pass by the Cosmos satellite with almost 2000 ft to spare. The Cosmos satellite was long left derelict and had no communication or propulsion systems whatsoever. The Iridium company decided not to alter course of their Iridium 33 satellite.

On February 10th of that year, the two satellites collided. The impact speed was 26,000 MPH. It occurred 490 miles above Siberia. Both satellites were obliterated. Within two years, the US Space Surveillance Network had cataloged over 2000 pieces of debris from that collision on March 24th, 2012. That's three years later, a piece of the former Cosmos satellite passed within 390 ft of the International space Station. During that time, the crew had to stay inside a Soyuz capsule in case of a collision. Apparently not content with simply polluting the surface of a planet, humans have decided that space needed to be messed up, too. We're talking about space junk, folks. There's a lot of it, and it's getting worse. As of 2020 there were over 19,000 pieces of individually tracked pieces of junk somewhere in orbit above the earth.

Those those 19,000 pieces. That includes 2200 pieces of non junk operational satellites. Like things we actually care about, just like 10% of all the stuff we track in orbit is actually functional. Useful satellites. The rest is just junk, and that's what we can track Half of it is fragmentation debris, like the remnants of the Iridium Cosmos collision. But then there's a lot more to it. There are somewhere around. This is estimates here because, remember, we only track 19,000 pieces. We think there are 34,000 objects larger than 10 centimeters in orbit around the earth. Artificial objects you know, there's always little space, rocks and stuff that we don't count. Contrast this with, like a century ago, where there were zero human made objects larger than 10 centimeters in orbit around the earth. And now we have 34,000. There's another million pieces of garbage larger than one centimeter in orbit around the earth, and then there's estimated to be another 100 million pieces no bigger than a centimeter.

Hey, hey, you remember back in 2007, when the Chinese government conducted an anti satellite missile test? No. Well, let me remind you, they launched what they called a kinetic kill vehicle, which is a very fancy and very military way of saying a rock At a Fengyang polar orbit. Weather satellite governments around the world went ballistic. They accused the Chinese of militarizing space and generally mucking up the place. But bear in mind that the US and the Soviets have both conducted anti satellite tests for decades, and they had just stopped long ago when they were satisfied that they could reliably do it. That one incident of an anti satellite missile test shooting down a satellite as it's orbiting the Earth in 2007 generated a total of 3438 tracked and monitored pieces of debris by 2016. Almost a decade later, only 571 of those had fallen into the atmosphere. Leaving from my maths is correct to somewhere around 3000 objects still in orbit.

A decade later, I know what you're thinking, OK, these are big numbers, 34,000 objects larger than 10 centimeters, 100 million smaller than you. There's a lot of things But space is big, really big I. I spend gobs of time on this show talking about just how big space is. So so what's the big deal if there's some junk up there? Well, yes, space is big and there is a lot of space, which is why we call it space. But there's not so much space around the Earth. Orbits are a relatively precious thing, and there's generally two kinds of orbits. I should do a whole episode on orbiting the Earth, but there there's two general kinds of orbits. Low Earth orbit in the geosynchronous orbit. Low Earth orbit is generally less than anything under 1200 miles altitude. There's not quite a lot of volume there, but you get an advantage. There is that there are all sorts of orbits, so some orbits are going with the rotation of the earth.

Some are going polar to like, totally perpendicular, some in between. Some change all the time, like so there's all sorts of different orbits, even though it's a relatively close pack space geosynchronous orbit. These are way high up. These are high enough so that a satellite can stay over one spot of land be in a fixed position on the sky as the earth rotates. There's a lot more room up there because it's way higher up and there's a lot more space. But you have a lot fewer options of orbits like, What's the point of being in geosynchronous orbit if you're gonna do a orbit that moves you over the poles that you're kind of wasting your time up there? And so there's a lot for your orbits. So the the point of this is that, yes, space is big, but we like to have our satellites in certain positions in certain orbits, in certain places around the earth. And when you can strain the space there of where you want operational satellites, and then that's also the place where the pollution is the highest.

Because that's where all the junk is, because that's where we're hanging out. That's the problem. It's like saying, Oh, no, no, no, no. The the pollution from your town isn't a big deal because it, like it, sits next to a river, and the river is super long, so like, who cares? But what? What you care about is the part of the river that you use and then whoever is downstream from you. If you you really mess up that part of the river, you can't drink from that part of the river, and so you don't get to use the river anymore. So, yes, the universe is large, possibly infinite. We've talked about that before, but what we care about is the junk in orbit, where we want to put useful things like satellites in human beings to give you an example of just how messed up things are getting. About one third of the pieces of space junk that might potentially pose a threat to the international space station in the next few years originated from that single 2007 antisatellite test in the international space station itself has to perform avoidance maneuvers about once a year.

It's just purely random chance, but about once a year they get an alert say, Hey, there's a piece of track space junk headed your way. It has more than a like a one in 1000 chance of hitting you, so you should do an avoidance maneuver that's once a year, and we have one space station in orbit. And if we're planning on putting more than one space station in orbit having lots of things in orbit. Um, this is gonna get kind of nasty pretty quickly. But even that 2007 anti satellite test wasn't the worst offender. When it comes to space junk, I have to tell you the story because it's just so hilarious. Uh, the single greatest source of space junk in the history of humanity was something called Project Westford. OK, it's the 19 sixties. It's the Cold War. There are no communication satellites yet, and And if you're a military superpower, let's let's take, for example, the United States. You have a problem. You need to communicate with your forces around the globe like you've got an aircraft carrier carrier over here.

You've got a bunch of tanks over here, and you want to tell them what to do. You can either use undersea cables to communicate, or you can bounce radio signals off of the ionosphere. This is a high part of the atmosphere that has lots of free ions and electrons, so it's like a free radio antenna up there in the sky, and you can send a radio signal up there and it will bounce off and you can get it to the other side of the globe. But what if the bad guy like, for example, the Soviets, cut the cables and you have to rely on the ionosphere and the ionosphere is like nice, But it's also variable because it's a natural thing. Sometimes it's stronger. Sometimes it's weaker. You you want to you you need a communication method that you can rely on. So there's a classic midcentury Cold War solution. If nature can't give us a reliable ionosphere, we're gonna make one project of Westford was a plan to launch 480 million copper needles into space, create an artificial ionosphere that we could use to bounce radio signals off of and communicate with troops overseas.

The first launch failed, but another in 1963 succeeded. We're not exactly sure how many needles were deployed, and thankfully, most of them have burned up in the atmosphere. And by the way, the project was ultimately canceled. Once we developed the technology for communication satellites, which was right around the corner and also everyone realized, just like how stupid it was Before I continue, I want to let you know that this episode of Ask a Spaceman is brought to you by my friends at better help. Better help provides easy, convenient, affordable access to online counseling and therapy. And, you know, the therapy has been an important part of my life. Experience is something I'm absolutely not ashamed to talk about. I wish more people used the therapists and counselors to take better care of their own mental health, just like they take care of their physical health. Uh, I know a lot of you turn tune into this show for Astro Thera as a word, but maybe if you're having a really tough time, you should talk to an actual professional, and so I encourage you to go to better help.

They are convenient and professional. It's real therapy and counseling, and it is affordable and you connect online. You don't have to wait in a waiting room or any of that. You just talk to someone who who cares and and knows what they're talking about. As a listener, you'll get 10% off your first month by visiting better help at better help dot com slash spaceman, and I want you to join over 1 million people who have taken charge of their mental health again, that's better help HE LP dot com slash spaceman Now back to our Astro therapy session brought to you by not a licensed psychologist, but an astrophysicist, but good enough, right? At least for now. But I gotta talk about the atmosphere. If you want to talk about space junk, you gotta talk about the atmosphere. The atmosphere is the ultimate trash can of low earth orbit. If you want to get rid of a satellite before it becomes a hazard, like if it's starting to deteriorate or if it's starting to explode or it might crash into something or you're just done with it and you have some control over the satellite, you just send it into the atmosphere and let all that energy, all that heat, burn it up, you know, and maybe a part of it will hit the ground.

But you know that's someone else's problem. A lot of launch vehicles that are used to get satellites up into orbit like first stages of rockets will not go into orbit around the earth. Instead, they will go up. They will send their payload off like a second stage or a satellite, you know, whatever. And once their job is done, uh, we try to guide them into a safe landing. Something called the Spacecraft Cemetery. This is in the Pacific. It's so cool. It's in the Pacific Ocean near Point Nemo, As it's called. It's the farthest place from land you could possibly be. It's just the middle of the Pacific. And, yeah, there's a spacecraft cemetery. There's a bunch of rockets sitting in the bottom of the ocean floor near Point Nemo in the Pacific, so I can imagine archaeologists tens of thousands of years from now. Once they figure out that Point Nemo exists. There have a field day digging up all of our old rockets, but that's generally the plan is that rockets go up, they send something into space, and then you ditch it in the Pacific Ocean.

And if you're done with something, if you have a satellite up there and you're done with it, you try to ditch it in the atmosphere and let the atmosphere burn it all up. But accidents do happen. Like their Skylab, NASA's first space station, it had a certain de orbit plan or like OK, we're done with the with the space station. We can't boost it again. It's gonna deteriorate. It's gonna burn up in the atmosphere. The predicted de orbit got wrong due to, uh, solar heating. So, like NASA predicted that the atmosphere would drag on the spacecraft a little bit on on the Skylab a little bit and then sap its energy, and they then they brand some math and figure out where it would actually land. But the sun was a little bit more active than they had planned, and they had accounted for in their models. The atmosphere was a little bit hotter, and a hotter atmosphere was a little bit bigger, and so it dragged on Skylab more than they had thought it would. And so they got it totally wrong. They had planned for it to come down just south of South Africa. You know, middle of the ocean.

No one cares. Instead, pieces of it hit Western Australia. Whoops around. This is an amazing number, like there's space junk in orbit and the atmosphere doesn't really have a hard cut off. It's not like you go from air, air, air, air and then switch. You're in space space, space vacuum, vacuum, vacuum. That's not how it works is there's air, less air, less air, even less air, even less air, even less air, even less air. You know, it just generally fades away in low Earth orbit. You can get a little bit of drag from the atmosphere, and that saps energy out of your orbit, which pulls you down to the ground. So a lot of satellites have to do some station keeping. They have to do a little bit of boosting, uh, to account for that atmospheric drag. And if you don't, eventually your orbit decays and you just end up on the ground. This process can take anywhere from a few months to a few decades, depending on your orbit and this number.

So there's satellites. There's junk we don't use anymore. If it's in low Earth orbit, eventually it makes its way to the ground, or at least in the atmosphere. There's around 100 tons of debris, making it to the surface every single year. So let me let me say that again, because that seems like an important number. Around 100 tons of debris make it to the earth's surface every single year. And these are not asteroids or micro meteoroids. No, this is junk falling from the sky, 100 tons of it every single year. Yes, the atmosphere does a fantastic job of burning up, but when you've got a like super heavy rocket engine that's dense and made of metal, it's gonna make it. Most of the time it crashes into the ocean because the our surface is 70% ocean. Sometimes it hits the ground. Sometimes it hits Lottie Williams, the first person so far the only. But that won't last long to be hit by a piece of space junk falling from the sky.

But here's the thing about ditching your satellite. So you got your satellite, you're done with it and you want to get rid of it. It actually takes a lot of energy. You can either wait for the atmosphere to do its job, but if you're high enough and the atmosphere is super thin, it's gonna take like centuries to do it. And who's got time for that? And if you want to send your spacecraft in the atmosphere, it actually takes a lot of energy because you're orbiting the earth at tens of thousands of MPH, and then to get into the atmosphere, you have to go like less than that, like five miles an hour. So you have to deorbit. You have to burn. You have to. You need rockets, you need fuel in order in order to do that. And that's hard, and especially if you're in geosynchronous orbit. If you're way up there. If you're like, really, really, really way up there, man, you are going so fast. You are so far from the earth, it the atmosphere. Oh gosh, it might as well be on the other side of the galaxy for the amount of energy you have to use instead geosynchronous satellites.

When they're done, we try to send them into something that I've discovered to be my favorite phrase that I have encountered when researching this episode. My phrase of the week the graveyard orbits the graveyard orbit. It's just an orbit that's a few 100 kilometers above geosynchronous orbit and new geosynchronous satellites. At least ones launched in the US and the EU are required to maintain enough fuel that when they're done with their little geosynchronous mission. They have enough fuel to boost them up to the graveyard when they're done. And so all it is is just yet another orbit. But it's very far away from the Earth where we don't put any useful satellites, and space is big enough that you're probably not gonna collide with them. And it's the graveyard orbit. Who knew who knew these things exist? The the the Rocket graveyard in the Pacific, the graveyard orbit around the Earth. But not every satellite does that. That's a relatively new thing, that satellites have an end of life plan to either ditch themselves into the atmosphere if they're in low Earth orbit or send themselves to the graveyard orbit if they're in geosynchronous orbit, that's a relatively new thing.

There are satellites that have launched before. That was common practice, you know, like when you read stories like Oh yeah, 100 years ago, we just left trash wherever we felt because we didn't we didn't know any better. Well, like we, we left satellites in orbit because we didn't know any better. Like there's the snap satellite, which is nuclear powered by the way it will remain in its orbit 810 miles above the Earth for the next 4000 years. There is a lot of junk up there. There's dead spacecraft. There's spent boosters. There's lost gear. There's a glove. There's a camera. There's a blanket. There's a wrench. There's a toothbrush. I'm not even gonna ask how the toothbrush got out. There are patreon supporters, someone please rescue them. Please go to patreon dot com slash PM Sutter so that we can develop a patreon supporter rescue plan. They are in orbit. They're crying for help, and your contributions every month can bring them back safely. Not necessarily in one piece, but we will bring their molecules back.

And then there's all the random bits of racked gear, unintentional and otherwise. There's paint flex. There's bits of metal. There's frozen propellant. There are screws in bolts. There's just junk, and it's getting worse. It's doubling every 15 to 20 years, and it's expected to go absolutely bonkers because we are launching satellites like crazy. And since we have no control over the junk, if it's a dead spacecraft or a screw or a paint fleck or a toothbrush, we can't like deorbit it or send it to the graveyard orbit. It just does whatever it does. And it's subject to all sorts of forces. It's subject to the gravitational force of the Earth. It's subject to heating more on one side than the other. It's subject to tiny little gravitational interactions with other junk in orbit. Their orbits can change, so that's why we have to actively track them. We can't just tag them like, OK, there's the toothbrush and then we know where the toothbrush is gonna be for the next decade.

No, we have to actively track it because it's changing all the time. The worst case scenario. The worst case scenario when it comes to space Junk has another awesome name. This episode is full of awesome names called the Kessler Syndrome. This is named after a NASA scientist, Donald Kessler, who first came up with this. He figured out that space junk can beget space junk like Let's say you have a couple of satellites and they crash into each other, and then they make a whole bunch of shrapnel. The shrapnel is orbiting the earth at tens of thousands of MPH, and then the shrapnel goes and wrecks another satellite, and then they crash into each other and they create more junk. And then that junk hits more satellites, and then they crash into each other. And there's more and more just cascading junk up until the point where everything in orbit is obliterated and you can't send any more stuff up because that will just get obliterated and contribute to the problem. So you your only choice is to sit there on the surface and wait for, like, 100 years for enough stuff to burn up in the atmosphere that you can start sending space missions again.

It's like piling up trash in front of your front door to the point that you can't open your front door anymore, and you have to wait for the wind to blow some away so you can open your door again and presumably PO put more trash out there. People are worried about this about Kesler syndrome becoming a thing because, like I said, we are going nuts with satellite launches. There are what we are calling mega constellations of communication satellites going up. These are companies like SpaceX with their StarLink program, one Web. Amazon has project. Cooper Uh, the Chinese government is doing it. There's probably like half a dozen others that they wanna wanna send up. You know, not a couple, not a couple dozen like 10,000 satellites each and put them all in Earth orbit and use them for broadband Internet access around the world, which presumably is a good thing. But it also increases the risk of collisions. It increases the risk of something going wrong.

Recently, a one Web satellite had to do a maneuver to avoid a SpaceX satellite just happened recently, and they're just getting started. They don't have 10,000 satellites up each. They just you know, I think SpaceX right now is like 1000 1 Web has 100 or something and there's no one in control. This is Space Law, and there's no such thing as space law. There's just individual governments with their requirements, But any government can do whatever they want. And then if you make an oopsie, you make a mistake like oh, whoops. We let our our Iridium satellite crash into the Cosmos satellite, and we let the Cosmo satellite be totally inactive and just hanging out. Um, we miss OK, No one you don't get in trouble, you don't go to space jail for it. This is an example of the tragedy of the Commons. Nobody has to clean up the mess that they make when there's an OOPSIE. When you send up 10,000 satellites and a couple of them crash and make a huge mess, you're not responsible for cleaning it up in.

So space junk just accumulates. Yes, the atmosphere naturally cleans out some of it, but we're putting up more junk than what our atmosphere can clean up for us. And so the risk of Kessler syndrome increases with time the risk of individual missions getting put in danger, either because there a paint fleck slams into a satellite and its satellite goes boom. Or if you're trying to have humans in space and a little circuit board carves a hole in your radiator, and then the radiator doesn't work anymore like this, this is real stuff. And because we're planning to launch so many more satellites, it's getting worse. What do we do about it? Well, one is to just monitor it. Uh, the US Space Surveillance Network, which is a part of the space Force and Yes, I try not to giggle every time I say Space Force. It's a real thing. Is a network of satellites and ground based telescopes and they publish.

I'm not making this up, but they publish the space catalog, which is a list of all the things that they track and they provide provide alerts, They say, Hey, hey, hey, hey, Hey, you you Hey, you company, uh, your or government, your satellite is about to crash into another one. figure it out and that's it. So it's up to this, like, patchwork made up on the spot, sending emails say, Hey, uh, are you gonna move the satellite or should we move the satellite? I don't know where the chances are. I don't know. And it's like not an easy thing to move a satellite because your satellite is in your orbit. It's doing its thing. It's there for a reason. And so to move. It means you may not have the satellite doing what you wanted to do for a while, and then it creates a new orbit, which it needs to be tracked. So if you move it, does this increase the chances of hitting something else. It's not an easy thing. That's why the Iridium folks, we good and they just miscalculated. So the US Space Surveillance Network will send out an alert, and then we just cross our fingers that everyone's on the ball.

And, like the the satellite admin person is awake and responding to email and, like, they get the alert on their phone and they're like, OK, hold on, hold on, hold on. I'm in the middle of cooking dinner. But yes, yes, we should. We should nudge our satellite, and we hope that it just works, which doesn't usually work out when we just cross our fingers and hope that everyone will just kind of solve this problem. But it turns out no one's people are developing solutions, but also there's no like framework. There's no enforcement for it. Individual governments are trying to prevent the accumulation of space junk they're urging or making satellite makers to use up all fuel and reactant so that when if a rocket does end up in orbit or in the atmosphere, at least it's not going to blow up on its own, which has happened. Try to ensure that rockets actually end up in the atmosphere at the end of their mission, sending satellites when they're done into the graveyard orbit.

And also, can we just, like, in, as an international community, take a break from the whole? Can we blow up satellites? Then we can all just agree that we can and move on and and stop testing that. And then there are a bunch of proposals out there for removing satellites like, What do you do with that nuclear powered satellite that's been dead? It's gonna hang out for 4000 years like that's not gonna go away. That's gonna be a problem for a while. What do you do about it? So one option is to launch another satellite, Because how else are you gonna get up there and somehow attach yourself to the dead satellite that you want to get rid of and push it down into the atmosphere? Maybe you drag it down with you, and so you send up one satellite and you take two down into the atmosphere. Or maybe you boost it up into the graveyard. Then there's another technique, which is another amazing phrase that I encountered when researching this episode. The laser broom the laser not making this up.

The laser room is a bunch of lasers on the surface of the earth. And then when the satellite passes overhead, you you shoot at the light, trying to heat up one side more than the other. And if you do it just right, this will shift its orbit and hopefully shift it into an orbit that will eventually end up in the Earth's atmosphere for the missions that are planned to send a satellite up to attach themselves to other satellites in order to gain control of them. Um, they are literally proposing these mission proposals to literally use nets and harpoons because apparently, when scientists and engineers try to come up with solutions to space debris, they take their inspiration from 19th century whaling ships. But it's a real idea, but these are all proposals. Um, one downside to dead satellite removal is that the cost to remove a satellite is essentially the cost to launch a satellite, and it's expensive to launch satellites, and so no one wants to spend that money Also, another downside.

Any satellite removal technology is also a destroyer enemy satellite technology, so it's hard to get everyone on board with the whole plan of like, yes, now this one country has the ability to remove enemy satellites without causing space junk whoops. And also there's no solution to all the little bits of paint, fleck and bolts and toothbrushes out there. There's no there's no way to get rid of those. So there's a lot of talk without a lot of action every couple of years. There's some well intentioned by half funded mission to test some technology. So far, almost all tests have been failures, and they've just, ironically added more junk to orbit. So who's gonna clean it up? I don't know. I don't know. I wish I knew the space junk problem is getting worse. We are launching so many more satellites in the coming decades than we ever have before, right? There's 2000 functioning satellites in Earth orbit right now. In a decade there could be 20,000.

They're gonna crash into each other. Folks like it's just it's a matter of time. And as soon as one of them goes, are we gonna get a Castler syndrome, this cascade of space junk? I don't know. I don't I hope not But as we send more and more missions up and there's more and more debris and pieces of junk tracked and untracked like the pain, flecks don't sound so bad until you realize that they're traveling at 17,000 MPH and they could, like, rip a hole in your arm. I don't wanna be there. And there's another problem to all this space junk that you may not think of. It's light pollution. Every single thing in space is at least a little bit reflective. Every satellite, every broken circuit board, every screw and bolt, every toothbrush is reflecting a little bit of sunlight, and it's making our entire sky brighter because they're all contributing. In fact, recent research has found that our sky right now today across the globe, even in dark sky preserves, is about 10% brighter than what it was 50 years ago.

Because of all the satellites and space junk mega constellations of satellites, these giant communication satellites are making this problem far worse just because there's gonna be a lot of them, and then the chances of more junk, more boosters, more accidental collisions, more paint, fleck, more spent propellant. SpaceX is saying they're making their satellites darker, but it's not really helping, and they're No. One under no obligation to do so. Like the sky is getting brighter and no one can tell them to stop. We can ask them to stop and then and astronomers have because astronomers are getting seriously worried about these mega constellations of satellites. Yes, you get global Internet access. Um, you also lose dark skies. You also lose a lot of fundamental astronomy. Astronomers have asked SpaceX to help. SpaceX has been like, Yeah, sure, OK, we'll make them darker. And it's like, not really the solution, because they're not as dark as SpaceX says they are making them.

That's what it comes down to do. We really want to live in a world where one person or one company can make that decision for us to to take away our darkest skies? Is that the world we want to live in where? Yes, I see the benefits of global Internet access, for sure, but I also see the downside and we're not getting to have that conversation, are we? We're not getting to have that discussion and debate. It's just happening, and astronomers are worried. I'm a little worried. I'm a little worried about light pollution. I'm a little bit worried about space junk. What's the solution? I don't know. The best thing I can recommend right now is a solution for light pollution and space. Junk is just keep talking about. Have this conversation Until we have more of this conversation, we'll never find that right balance. We'll never find a solution. We'll never find a set of regulations or recommendations to solve space junk to solve light pollution from satellites and space junk.

We need to talk about it, so I urge you to talk about it, thanks to aka B on email and Barbara B on email for the questions that led to today's episode Thank you to my top patreon supporters. That's patreon dot com slash PM Sutter Thank you again for all of your support, especially Matthew K, Justin Z, Justin G, Kevin No Duncan M Coy D, Barbara K, Neuter Dude, Robert M, Nate H and her F. Chris L, Cameron NAIA, Aaron S, Tom B, Scott M, Rob H and Lowell T. For your contributions, please keep sending me questions. Hashtag ask us Spaceman, ask us, Spaceman at gmail dot com. Ask us spaceman dot com for the website for all the episode archives, you know. Also check out my YouTube channel where it's like this, but with graphics and pictures, Check out my book How to Die in Space Space Junk should have had its own chapter in that book Getting hit by a random piece of space junk. You will certainly die. And please, please, please. If you haven't already go to iTunes and leave a review, it seriously helps the show and just keep sharing the show, sharing love of astronomy and especially talking about space junk and what we can do about it and I'll see you next time for more complete knowledge of time and space.

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