We came this close...
Did you know how close we came just one week ago to potentially losing the Earth's entire satellite network?
Thanks for reading my newsletter separating reality from sensationalist bullshit in pop culture. Sometimes reality can be pretty sensational too though, as we see in today’s edition. Tuesdays are free to all; Thursdays are for paid subscribers only. Oh look, a really neat button:
The single most sobering Skeptoid episode I ever worked on was the one on space junk, and whether a scenario like that depicted in the movie Gravity was possible, or even probable. That is a runaway cascade, almost certainly caused by the collision of two satellites producing thousands of projectiles, which it turn destroy more satellites. Within a matter of hours, such a cascade would likely cause the loss of our entire satellite system — no more TV or Internet, folks — and no new satellites possible for centuries. I say that episode was sobering because the more I learned about the subject, the more inevitable such an event seemed to be. It’s called the Kessler Syndrome, after the astrophysicist who first characterized the problem in 1978.
Currently we are adding new stuff up there, both through launches and collisions, at a rate far higher than pieces are de-orbiting. We do lots of stuff to try and mitigate this, like policy requiring satellite end-of-life actions like self-deorbiting, but the majority of satellites fail to meet those policies. Check the episode if you want to read all the links and reports of how this is going, but the short answer is that one more catastrophic collision like the 2007 Chinese anti-satellite missile test or the 2009 Iridium/Kosmos collision could easily do it.
Today the Space Surveillance System issues an average of 21 near-miss warnings every day. But few are like what happened last week.