Until May 29, 1953, Mt. Everest was one place on Earth that man had never set foot upon. Sir. Edmund Hillary and sherpa Tenzig Norgay took it upon themselves on this date to climb to it’s summit and change this fact forever. Since then, scores of climbers each year test their limits and make their own attempts on its forbidding 29,029ft summit. In fact, the term “traffic jam” has now become a common climbing expression when referring to the literal lines of climbers on any given day that can can crowd the routes to the top, literally bottlenecking under places like the “Hillary Step” and the South Summit while each team competes for their right to jump ahead of the rest in order to reach their so-called “destiny” of reaching the top of the world.
The sad result of this increased demand to climb Everest, or “Chomolungma” as it’s known by the local Tibetans, has resulted in heavily littered slopes and cols riddled with everything from oxygen tanks, ropes and climbing gear left behind and even bodies of those who’s dreams were cut abruptly short. In the last few years, a couple of expeditions have ventured to climb the mountain in an attempt to clean up some of the massive amounts of “debris” scattered along its ridges, but their success has been tapered by the effects of hauling such weights at extreme altitudes, storms and illness. So to this day, the majestic Everest still lays covered in trash of all kinds with no immediate plan to cleanse her of her filth.
Several articles as of recent have now begun to discuss the ramifications of a similar development above each of our heads in the day or night sky. Near-space and Earth’s orbital highways are now becoming utterly riddled with space debris of all kinds, criss-crossing the night sky from any field of view.
It is said that right now, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 7,500 objects left behind by previous space missions or abandoned satellites orbiting our planet with absolutely no defined intentions to retrieve or dispose of them. There are a few thousand other fragments of paint, debris and other materials smaller than a baseball also aloft in orbit which are too small to track by our ground based radars which are tasked with monitoring space debris. Considering the sheer number of objects in orbit and their rate of speed (17,500mph), a new level of concern has arisen within the space community, and for good reason. The two most concerning issues of this mesh of free-floating debris are, (1) potential collisions or impacts with operating space craft in orbit, and (2) the simple fact that earth’s orbit is quickly becoming a forgotten junkyard for NASA and international space communities.
NASA mission controllers are now forced to plan their routes through orbit as the debris now dictates which paths they can take. Spacecrafts like the shuttle must plot a careful course so that it may reach the International Space Station without colliding with any of this debris. Even the smallest of the free-floating objects can slam into the side of the shuttle (see article here about damage suffered by shuttle in 2007), causing dents, damage and possibly even penetrating it’s outer shell and causing potentially irreparable or even fatal damage. It is said that the majority of the larger orbiting debris will eventually succumb to the earth’s gravity and fall back to earth, in which they usually burn up upon re-entry. But this does not prove true for the smaller objects.
Of course, there is also the ever growing issue of conservation both within and without of our atmospheric bubble. How can the space community carelessly leave such objects out in orbit and not plan properly to dispose of all this waste? How can they not be concerned with this growing problem of our “orbital junkyard?”
One of the scenes that struck me on last night’s rebroadcast of “In the Shadow of the Moon” was the footage of the lunar lander boosting away from the moon’s surface and clearly visible in the back drop was a wave of scattering bits of trash left behind in the wash of the thrusters by the astronauts themselves. As the lander gained in altitude, it also became clear that the base of the lander itself was also left behind. One, if not several of the astronauts made comments like, “It’s so pristine and beautiful, like the Arizona deserts but grayish-white,” or “the contrast of the black sky and the gray colored hills is amazing.” How could they be so aware of the tranquil beauty of the lunar landscape, yet have such disregard for it at the same time?
There needs to be some level of responsibility when it comes to space travel and what we leave behind upon our return. Heck, trail hiker and backpackers live by the slogan, “Pack-in, Pack-out.” People are fined and ticketed by police when trash is thrown in anything but a trash receptacle. So how is it we, as a global community, can find the littering of our space environment as even remotely acceptable? NASA and other space programs of the world must adapt a more pro-active approach to how they handle and discard of their respective “space trash.”
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