Even tiny pieces of junk can pose serious risks to astronauts. Scientists call for a global treaty to eliminate increasing orbiting debris
ixty-six years ago, there was just a single human-built object in Earth orbit. It was Sputnik, the Soviet Union’s—and the world’s—first satellite, launched on Oct. 4, 1957. Now take a moment and try to guess how many objects—including active satellites, defunct satellites, and bits of debris from all of that space traffic—are currently circling the planet. Have you made your guess? Good.
Your answer is wrong. Or let’s put it this way: it’s wrong unless the figure you guessed is 100 trillion. That’s the jaw-dropping number cited by an international team of researchers writingcalling for a global treaty to curb the amount of satellites and rubbish that have been forming an ever-growing debris belt in low-Earth orbit for more than three generations now.
The researchers report that there are currently 9,000 active satellites in orbit—a number expected to grow to over 60,000 by 2030. The 100 trillion figure includes everything from spent boosters and stray bolts, to metal flecks and floating paint chips that went along with launching all of that hardware. And don’t think something as small as a paint chip is harmless. Orbiting the Earth at 28,200 km/hr , so small a piece of rubbish can strike a spacecraft or other orbiting object like a bullet.
“As a marine biologist I never imagined writing a paper on space,” said Heather Koldewey, a senior marine technical adviser at the Zoological Society of London and a coauthor of the letter, in a statement that accompanied its release. “But through this collaborative research [we] identified so many parallels with the challenges of tackling environmental issues in the ocean. We just need to get better at the uptake of science into management and policy.
The researchers see hope for space in the progress that has been made so far in cleaning up the oceans—or at least in nations agreeing to try. In March 2022, world leaders representing 170 nations signed a global plastics treaty at the
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