How Space Junk Threatens Us

The above article was in the "SAFETY" report in Sunday's May 10, 2009 St. Petersburg Times Newspaper Parade section. A spate of recent extraterrestrial incidents is giving new urgency to international efforts to decrease the danger posed by space junk, the remains of rockets and derelict satellites that have been accumulating in Earth's orbit for 50 years. NASA space shuttles and the International Space Station recently survived close encounters, and a U.S. communications satellite was destroyed in February when it hit an obsolete Russian satellite. "Unfortunately, we will see more collisions," says William Ailor, director of the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies at The Aerospace Corporation. "There's an awful lot of debris up there." NASA currently follows 17,000 orbiting objects and has set rules to limit the litter its missions produce. Cleaning up the exsisting waste, however, remains a "a technical and economic challenge." NASA says space junk remains a threat to "the safety of persons and property in space and on Earth." Traveling at more than 20,000 mph, even a tiny piece of debris could cause catastrophic damage to spacecraft, including satellites that relay cellular phone calls and other critical voice and data communications around the globe.

Even if NASA would set rules to limit the litter its missions produce, who will set the same rules for the other 45 Space Agencies? I believe the solution is to stop launching useless satellites into orbit. How many more weather satellites do we need in orbit? Meteorologist can't seem to predict weather conditions any better now than before all those thousands of Weather satellites were launched. How many GPS's (Global Positioning Satellites) do we need to find a location? Why not depend on our minds, thats what we used prior to GPS's. How many Spy satellites do we or other nation's need to spy on each other? Isn't that an invasion of privacy that generally leads to problems that end up as countries breaking off relations with one another and eventually leading to War? STOP these useless launchings and save this planet.