Somewhere in the Constellation Detritus

I recall an experience back from my Boy Scout days while hiking in Kings Canyon National Park's Evolution Canyon when I found the used packaging from some vacuum packed camp food crap under a rock, presumably where nobody would ever find it. Wrong, jackasses. At the time I thought to myself "My, is there any corner of this planet mankind won't befoul?" Judging by this experience in the full on wilderness, plus what's going on out in the Pacific Gyre, I'm guessing I wouldn't like the answer to that pressing question.

Littering has to be the simplest conservation faux pas to nip in the bud. It's brainless: don't toss junk on the ground, stick it in your pocket, handbag, backpack, yak skin pouch, etc. Well, now NASA's Earth Observatory website gives us another reason to pull up our socks on this matter, because litterers have taken--actually have been taking--their game to the next level with heaps and heaps of SPACE TRASH!

It's interesting that the truly excellent manga and anime Planetes by Makoto Yukimura is one of the only places I've seen this issue addressed in popular media. That series is the story of a group of orbital garbage collectors in the near future when space development has gone commercial and the presence of debris has reached a level where life in LEO is threatened by it.

But is orbital debris a danger now? No, the stuff's not going to rain down on us and snuff out whoever happens to be standing in just the wrong (or right) spot, and it probably won't even affect the ISS. NASA has, no doubt, taken the debris into account with their placement of the station. However, provided engineers can overcome the technological hurdles that stand between present day vanilla jumbo jets and a future of cost-effective bitchin' suborbital or LEO intercontinental commercial flight, it's not too fanciful to imagine near misses with a communications satellite that went dark in 1978.

Even if you're not a romantic who believes the future of the human race lies beyond this gravity well you have to admit it's still icky to have all that junk circling overhead polluting the Final Frontier. I want to look up and see Infinity, not come away thinking about the Davis Street dumps.

--Matt