BERLIN (Reuters) - Space, the final frontier, is rapidly becoming one big trash dump, experts warned at a conference in Germany on Tuesday.
Thousands of rocket launches since the dawn of the Space Age in 1957 have left a growing amount of orbiting debris that may badly hamper future launches into space.
"The problem is very serious," said Sergei Kulik, head of the international division of the Russian Aviation and Space Agency. "If we continue to waste a lot of garbage in space . . . the outlook is very dangerous," he told Reuters
"In the middle of this century the contamination may be so big that a kind of a cascade effect could appear, a collision between the space debris particles creating more and more [collisions]," he said, adding that could eventually mean "there will be no possibility of flying in space at all."
Kulik is one of about 200 experts who are meeting at the European Space Agency's operation center in Darmstadt, Germany this week to address the problem of space debris.
The largest object humanity has put into space, the
140-ton Russian Mir space station, is due to crash to Earth on Friday after 15 years in orbit, with much of it burning up as it enters the atmosphere. Kulik said Russia had made careful plans to avoid leaving behind any orbiting debris.
According to the European Space Agency, scientists can identify about 8,500 man-made objects now orbiting the Earth, only about 600 of which are operational satellites or spacecraft.
If one counts tiny bits of metal and debris, the total number of orbiting trash items rises to between 100,000 and 150,000, the agency estimates. Computer simulations of the problem show the Earth surrounded by debris ranging from bolts and straps to enormous fuel tanks.
Only recently a problem
Just last week American astronaut Jim Voss inadvertently
added to the growing amount of orbiting trash when he dropped a foot-restraint system during a spacewalk. NASA decided to move the International Space Station to dodge the object, which now orbits the Earth at speeds of about five miles per second.
"Until recently it was not a problem because there were not so many powers very active in space," said Bess Reijnen, a Dutch professor of international space law, who is also attending the meeting in Germany.
"But now in 40 years of space flight, there have been about 4,000 launchings and they continue to create debris, especially in the near-Earth orbit, that is up to about 2,000 kilometers above sea level."
No human has ever been harmed by space debris, but part of the U.S. space station Skylab killed a cow in Australia when it fell to Earth in 1979. The most serious debris collision in space came in 1996 when a French spy satellite hit a fragment of a French Ariane rocket.
Experts say cleaning up the debris is extremely difficult if at all possible, so the focus should be on stemming its growth in the future.
"Technically, it has become clear that some code of conduct or protocol or legal regulation should be set up," Reijnen said. "Here at this conference the political willingness to do such a thing is increasing."
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