The future of space travel is under attack – by millions of pieces of debris from old satellites and missions that surround Earth. Go inside the effort by the United States Government and others to combat the lethal threat of space junk.
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LearningTranscript
00:00It was mid-morning, and I was getting ready to exercise, and we were just sort of getting into our mid-morning routine, if you will.
00:17We got a call that we were having a red conjunction, and we were looking around, what the heck is a red conjunction?
00:21You know, because we hadn't really trained for it.
00:23Astronauts on the International Space Station prepare for impact.
00:30A chunk of an old rocket body is heading their way.
00:36It was a little bit chaotic, because this was the first time we had had one of these.
00:41The International Space Station is traveling 17,000 miles per hour, or 22 times the speed of sound.
00:50The object is coming at them head-on, just as fast.
01:05It gets hit by something relatively small.
01:11It penetrates, but because the pressure inside it just forces the modules to open up, just like a balloon burst.
01:17And that happens extremely quickly.
01:20And with no chance that an astronaut in that module could ever get out.
01:24Five, four, three, two, one, and liftoff!
01:44And liftoff!
01:48First itch for propulsion for farming anomaly.
02:00Outer space.
02:03The vast frontier beyond our atmosphere.
02:07A pristine vacuum.
02:09Until recently, that is.
02:10After decades of heavy use, the orbits around our planet are now full of junk.
02:23Space junk is all the stuff that we've launched into orbit that no longer serves a useful purpose.
02:28So it's satellites, it's rocket bodies, it's old gloves, it's toolkits that astronauts have accidentally dropped.
02:39Basically, litter that we've left in space.
02:42But why should we care about overcrowded orbits in space, when we've got plenty of traffic congestion right here on Earth?
02:56Because from GPS, to cell phones, to the weather forecast.
03:01Life as we know it on Earth, cannot function without satellites above.
03:16Unless we tackle the debris problem, there is going to be no weather forecast.
03:19There is going to be no news story from the other side of the world.
03:22You're not going to be able to turn on the television and see the World Cup.
03:25There are over 1,265 satellites operating overhead right now.
03:32And each one needs a clear lane in order to travel safely.
03:41No one thought orbital debris was much of a threat until around 1970.
03:46A NASA scientist named Donald Kessler started making calculations and realized that leaving junk in orbit is a formula for disaster.
03:59People tend to think of orbit like a road through space.
04:02I mean, as long as you stay on your road, you're not going to get hit.
04:05It would be more accurate to think of the Earth as being one big paved planet.
04:10And when you want to go someplace, you drive in a straight line from one place to another.
04:16And, of course, with no stoplights and no place to stop.
04:21And you're going to be running into each other in all kinds of directions.
04:25That's exactly what you've got in orbit.
04:27So I ended up with an equation where I could write the spatial density, its apogee, and inclination.
04:33Then you can do neat things like...
04:35Donald Kessler's key insight is that when chunks of space trash collide into one another,
04:39they splinter into more space junk.
04:42If you want to know the flux, the spatial density...
04:46Each collision sets off an exponential cascade of collisions
04:49that will eventually destroy every satellite in orbit.
04:53This death spiral is now known as the Kessler syndrome.
04:57Integrated over the volume.
05:03In other words, if you never launch anything else in space,
05:05there will still be this cascading phenomena that continues to grow,
05:10and actually it continues until you essentially grind up all the satellites
05:14and the small dust particles.
05:15Pre-pass SBN 26.
05:26No time critical commanding.
05:27No satellite injunctions.
05:28Good on step six.
05:30All data feeds externals are open, and both communication lines to the site are good.
05:34No applicable SIFs or TPs.
05:36You're good to execute.
05:37Copy that, ma'am.
05:39The United States Air Force Space Command takes Donald Kessler's predictions very seriously.
05:46Those objects can go on 17,000 miles an hour.
05:49When you're going 17,000 miles an hour, it does not take a big piece of debris to ruin your day.
05:55In the early 1980s, they started keeping tabs on any orbital trash larger than a baseball.
06:02Back then, there were 6,000 such objects.
06:05Give Level 1 a call on the TTC-56.
06:10For decades, that number grew only slightly.
06:13An international agreement kept space junk under control
06:17by sending used rocket bodies down into the upper atmosphere,
06:20where they harmlessly burn up.
06:26That plan worked until 2007,
06:29when the Chinese fired a missile into a weather satellite they no longer needed.
06:33It was proof that they could hit such a target and destroy it.
06:37I think they did that because they realized that the United States military is critically dependent on space.
06:44And they felt like if they were going to be able to effectively respond to whatever challenges they had in the future,
06:52they needed to develop a way to challenge our space capabilities.
06:55Basically, there's not a single military operation that takes place in the world today that is not critically dependent on space capabilities.
07:03And if space goes away, we do not fight as effectively as we would otherwise.
07:07That Chinese target practice demonstrated what a war in space might look like.
07:12It also highlighted the danger of any collision in space, intentional or accidental.
07:19After the collision, you see quite a compact debris cloud at the start.
07:23But then because some of the fragments are thrown into high orbits and some are thrown into low orbits,
07:28the speed is different. So you see the debris cloud stretch out and it forms this ring.
07:32Now because the Earth is not spherical, it causes the debris ring to start to stretch out.
07:40It moves the orbits around the planet.
07:43So it goes from this kind of compact debris cloud right at the start to the situation where all of that debris
07:49ends up being distributed all the way around the planet.
07:51That one incident when China demolished its own satellite in 2007 increased the amount of killer space trash by almost 30%.
08:10The commander of America's space defense operations feels that worse is yet to come.
08:15If you go to war in space and it becomes a kinetic war, you create a debris field that is just unmanageable and you can't operate or fly in it.
08:28So I hope to never go to war in space.
08:31But at the same time, if we're threatened, we have to be able to defend ourselves and we have to be able to defend ourselves right now.
08:37The debris problem continues to grow.
08:45In 2009, an American communications satellite collided with an out of control Russian Cosmos satellite.
08:52That collision gave the Air Force 4,000 more pieces of junk to keep track of.
08:58With over 17,000 large objects flying in all directions,
09:02Kessler's calculations predict a major collision within five years.
09:09What happens when a small piece of metal and a spacecraft slam into each other at a combined speed of 30,000 miles per hour?
09:21No such collision has actually been observed firsthand in space.
09:25So scientists created a full-scale experiment here on Earth.
09:28Lots of people fire things like that, for instance, and many things, many physical phenomenon do not scale with size very well.
09:41So we really wanted to get a full-scale, full-size test.
09:45This was the size of the object.
09:47It was maybe a little bit shorter, but basically a large hollow object is more representative of something that's actually in space,
09:53like maybe a small satellite or a piece of a small satellite.
09:58Patty Schaefer fired the soup-can-sized object into a metal tank at 20 times the speed of sound.
10:05Is that T-minus 10?
10:07Yes, that's T-minus 10.
10:09Nine, eight, and then you hear this .
10:13And the building literally shakes a little bit, but I think a lot of it is me, you know, just being freaked out.
10:18And then you see your screen flash up, and it's over.
10:23All that work is turned into this.
10:25So this piece of modern art here is what the tank looks like.
10:46Now this is the top of the tank.
10:48Right here it folded after it flew through the inside, but you can see it's all splayed out.
10:55The intense heat of the explosion turned solid metal instantly into gas.
11:00When that vaporized metal cooled and turned back into a solid, Patty found these.
11:05Hundreds of aluminum flakes.
11:08On Earth, they're harmless.
11:10But when they're zooming around like bullets in space, they're lethal.
11:13Now that's about, what is that, 250 milligrams.
11:19That's a little bit heavier than an ibuprofen pill.
11:23And the energy that would have on orbit would be about the same as a hot loaded .357 Magnum.
11:30So that's a lot of momentum.
11:32And the energy would be more like a .50 caliber Browning machine gun sniper round.
11:37So if you're going to think about how dangerous this is on orbit, think .357 Magnum .50 caliber sniper round.
11:45Somewhere in there.
11:53So if there are many more particles produced than we thought,
11:57ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times more, then it has a snowball effect.
12:01Because each one of those particles, if there's ten times more, there could be ten times more strikes.
12:05And each one of those makes ten, so that's ten times ten, which is a hundred.
12:10If there's a hundred times more, then each one of those can make stripes,
12:13which is a hundred times a hundred, which is ten thousand.
12:16So it snowballs rapidly.
12:18The question is, how rapidly is it going to snowball?
12:21And the only way we can know that is to know how many of these particles we can't see are actually made.
12:35The satellites that we rely on so heavily are under attack.
12:50By an enemy we created.
12:53We have trashed our own neighborhood.
12:56Earth's orbits are littered with half a century's discarded technology.
12:59Millions of tiny fragments, too small to detect, are traveling ten times faster than bullets.
13:11And they won't stop until they smack into something bigger.
13:14There's one target in their path with a wingspan as big as a football field.
13:23Steve, we showed you stowing the socket caddy when you get there on the adjustable tether.
13:28The International Space Station.
13:34Bits of metal can pierce the shell of the ISS, as astronaut Jim Riley observed during the spacewalk.
13:43And as we're tilting back, we're going past this radiator.
13:47I noticed right out on the end of it, there were three what looked like bullet holes.
13:50Right, about the size of about a 7.62 millimeter round.
13:54And it's about the size of my thumb, three of them.
13:57Just about that size.
13:59There was a fourth hole on the flight immediately behind mine.
14:01A fellow named Rick Mastracchio was working in the same area.
14:04And down by Rick, there's a fourth bullet hole in there.
14:10The space station's hull is built of layers that can absorb direct hits from tiny objects.
14:16What you see here is a mock-up of the Columbus module of the European Space Agency,
14:25which is on the International Space Station.
14:28And here you see on the outer surface, the whipple shield has been implemented everywhere.
14:34You see here a cutaway part, and you can see the outer wall, the bumper.
14:39Then you have some stuffing shown here, and the inner wall, which is finally supposed to stop the particle.
14:46The whipple shield can stop objects as big as a pea from piercing the space station's inner hull.
15:02And with radars and optical telescopes, NASA is able to see anything larger than a baseball heading toward the station.
15:19With enough warning, the ISS can move out of harm's way.
15:22But it's the objects that fall between the pea and the baseball that are the real danger.
15:31Objects between one centimeter and ten centimeter roughly, they can neither be avoided nor shielded.
15:36So there's a dark risk that remains even for the International Space Station.
15:41No one could see a piece of garbage the size of a marble in time to get out of the way, and a marble traveling over 20,000 miles per hour could easily punch a hole in the ISS.
15:59So the space station is a pressurized module. That means that the pressure inside is greater than the pressure outside. It's a vacuum outside the space station.
16:17And the equivalent down here is a balloon. You know, you blow air into a balloon. The pressure is greater inside the balloon than outside the balloon.
16:26And we all know what happens if you stick a pin into a balloon.
16:32If you look at that balloon bursting in slow motion, as the pin goes in, the balloon unzips.
16:41And that's one of the things that could happen on the station.
16:44It gets hit by something relatively small, penetrates, but because the pressure inside it just forces the modules just to open up, just like a balloon bursting.
16:56And that happens extremely quickly, and with no chance that an astronaut in that module could ever get out.
17:08The International Space Station is a gangly beast controlled by 52 computers.
17:14It's not a single vehicle, but a collection of pressurized modules as big as a six-bedroom house.
17:19It cannot change direction easily.
17:21You have to program the kind of burn you want to do. You have to program the maneuver to the station needs to get to do the kind of burn you want to do based on which jets you're using.
17:29It takes several days.
17:31They may have gotten it down faster than that, but it's not just, okay, flip a switch, let's move the station. It's not that straightforward.
17:40In 2014, the station moved three times to avoid large chunks of orbital debris.
17:45But as astronaut Sandra Magnus knows, there isn't always time to move out of the way.
18:00It was mid-morning, and I was getting ready to exercise, and we were just sort of getting into our mid-morning routine, if you will.
18:07And we got a call that we were having a red conjunction, and we're looking around, what the heck is a red conjunction, you know, because we hadn't really trained for it.
18:18A red conjunction is a warning code issued by NASA when the ISS is in the path of incoming space junk without enough time to move out of harm's way.
18:27It was a little bit chaotic because this was the first time we had one of these.
18:35A five-inch chunk from an old rocket body is heading straight for the station.
18:40It's about the size of a compact disc, ten times bigger than the station's whipple shield can absorb.
18:46A direct hit would puncture the station's hull and suck the oxygen right out.
18:50Sandra rushes to the Soyuz capsule, which is always attached to the space station for use as a life raft.
18:56When the Soyuz docks to station, it's put in sort of, I'll call it a sleep mode, because you really don't need it while you're on station, because it's your, you know, delivery vehicle and your go-home vehicle.
19:08But when you're getting ready to evacuate from the station, whether it's a nominal or a contingency, you have to power all that stuff up.
19:15And there's a certain sequence of things that you have to go through to do that.
19:17Sandra tries to remain calm.
19:28It's either going to hit or it's not going to hit.
19:32And so worrying about it doesn't help you.
19:34All you have to do is just prepare everything that you need to prepare so that if it hits, then you're in the best possible configuration.
19:41And if it doesn't hit, well, then you just go on and do it anyway.
19:46The Soyuz capsule has a small window.
19:49As Sandra sits and waits, she can't help but take a peek.
19:52So I'm looking out the portal thinking, oh, maybe I can see it.
19:59You know, your view is like this, right?
20:02It's like looking out of a peephole of a door.
20:05And I was laughing at myself, going, there's no way, because if I saw it, it would be really bad.
20:09Because it would be right there.
20:11Fortunately, the dangerous junk misses the station by 2.8 miles.
20:16NASA learned from the incident and updated their preparations for the next red conjunction.
20:26We got through it. It was all good.
20:29So it wasn't that everybody didn't know what needed to be done, but it's like, what order do you communicate?
20:33What's the most important thing you communicate?
20:35Who communicates what to who?
20:37So there was a lot of refinement that needed to happen.
20:39And so we instituted that after this.
20:46Okay, heads open and stowed.
20:50In just the past five years, the amount of killer space trash circling Earth has gone up by over 20% to 22,000 pieces.
21:1422,000 pieces and that's just the orbital debris that we can detect, the bits larger
21:27than a baseball.
21:31Scientists calculate that there are millions of smaller particles, too small to detect
21:36on radar, hurtling around our planet at lethal speeds.
21:43These smaller bits of space trash don't present a threat to the humans inside the space station,
21:51but when astronauts venture out into the vacuum of space, they're unprotected.
22:04While working on NASA's human space flight program, Dr. Kevin Fong learned how vulnerable
22:10astronauts on a spacewalk really are.
22:18Okay, we checked all four systems.
22:23Modulation all four and keying with a go.
22:27These guys are out there, tumbling around the Earth, holding onto this space station,
22:33traveling at 17,500 miles an hour, 250 miles off the ground, with nothing between them and
22:40death but this multi-layered suit and a visor.
22:44That's walking in space.
22:51Space walkers have no way to shield themselves from objects speeding like bullets in all directions.
22:57Even a tiny tear in the space suit can be lethal.
23:01The suit can sustain a hole somewhere between an eighth and a quarter of an inch and that will
23:07still have enough volume within the oxygen tanks to give you about 15 minutes to get back into the airlock.
23:13The problem on the station, though, is that you can be 15 minutes away and farther when you're doing some of your work.
23:20The energy contained within a single fleck of paint traveling at these enormous velocities is much more akin to the energy you see contained within a high explosive.
23:32This strange-looking assembly of pipes and tubes can shoot objects at ten times the speed of a bullet.
23:50The bullet being tested today is TINI, a one-millimeter steel bullet.
24:02Small.
24:07This is about the size and weight of your typical space junk.
24:11In space, small is what's frequent. Large is not very common.
24:21A tiny debris fragment like this, or a fleck of paint, is the most likely thing to hit an astronaut on a spacewalk.
24:29How much damage could a little thing like this cause?
24:34Space suit is kind of a bit of a misnomer. It's not a suit. It's the world's smallest spacecraft.
24:49Two, three, seven, inland.
24:51You depend upon it entirely for your life, because inside that suit is an atmosphere that you can breathe, a warmth enough to keep you alive, and something that can repel heat when it's out there.
25:04Flight out. Alpha two, counter clockwise two.
25:09And it all looks great, and it all looks nice and floaty, but actually, these are some of the most terrifying moments in all of human space exploration.
25:18This is the maximal exposure that an individual can have out there. This is where they are stripped of all of the protections that have been engineered over years.
25:27It's hard to think of an environment or a situation in which you would be more vulnerable.
25:37One of the most vulnerable parts of a space suit is the transparent faceplate.
25:42This is a piece of plastic, a polycarbonate, which is typically used in space, for example, as a shield across the visor of the helmet an astronaut might wear.
25:55So he'd be looking out through it, protecting him from the environment.
25:59What we're going to do with it here is we're going to put it in the gun and fire one of our very small particles at 14,000 miles an hour towards it.
26:05This sheet of polycarbonate is the same thickness as a space suit visor.
26:15So this is our polycarbonate after the impact experiment.
26:35So our one millimetre object, travelling at 14,000 miles per hour, has pumped straight through the front.
26:40At the back, there's a slightly larger hole, so it's gone through and removed material from the rear surface.
26:47And that's kept on going and hit what's on the far side, potentially an astronaut.
26:53OK, Nicole, I have my gate closed and locked.
26:57With that, you are going to release your waist better from the internal day ring.
27:00Jim Riley has walked in space five times. He says space junk is part of the job.
27:14You know, at some point, you know, you get hit by something of any size, it's pretty much game over.
27:19But, you know, we accept those risks even here on Earth.
27:24You know, you can get hit by a bus and it's just, it's your day, right?
27:28So you accept that.
27:30That's got it in there, got a good setback.
27:33Right, that looks like it's in there.
27:36When the space age started, NASA designed the space suits so that the astronauts could survive impacts of very small dust.
27:43But as the space age has gone on and bits of paint are flaked away from the outside of spacecraft,
27:49or sometimes a disused satellite explodes and showers space with very fine debris,
27:54there is more and more debris about the size we've been shooting here today.
27:58Sooner or later, in the next decade or two, an astronaut will be struck by something this size.
28:13The amount of killer space junk has been growing steadily for decades.
28:28Each year, the United States Air Force Space Command has more and more pieces of orbital debris to keep track of.
28:37It could get much worse very soon.
28:39Scientists are keeping a close eye on 17 abandoned Russian SL-16 rocket bodies that are orbiting just 30 miles apart from one another.
28:50Each one is about the size of a railroad car.
28:54There's a one in 400 chance over the next 10 years of two of those SL-16 rocket bodies colliding.
29:02So you may ask, that doesn't sound like that's too bad.
29:08I don't know how many of you would go and take the subway tomorrow into work if there's a one in 400 chance that that subway wasn't going to make it into work.
29:16A collision between two or more of those huge old rockets could create thousands of new threats.
29:28But what worries some people even more is the threats we don't know about.
29:32What I'm really more concerned about is kind of like the canary in the mine.
29:39I don't care about the big breakups.
29:42I care about the satellites that are failing for unknown reasons.
29:45Because, statistically, you know you have many more of the lethal, non-trackable objects than you do of the trackable fragments that are going to break things up.
29:54So what a precursor should be, an indicator that we're getting close to the Kessler syndrome, is that we have many more satellites that have anomalies for unknown reasons.
30:05Discovery, Roger. Go for deploy.
30:08Two.
30:10Three.
30:12Roger. Lift off and the clock is started.
30:14The Earth Observational Satellite, known as Envysat, was built in Britain in 2002 for the European Space Agency.
30:27Two. One. Top.
30:30To the image of the Vulcan.
30:32The landing.
30:35It was the largest civilian Earth observation satellite ever fired into space.
30:40But in April 2012, it suddenly stopped working.
30:52So all of a sudden it went from generating huge amounts of data for scientists down on the ground to basically one of the biggest pieces of junk that we see on orbit.
31:01Some scientists suspect Envysat was taken out by space junk.
31:05Sometimes there is no clear indication and it's just a suspicion that smaller particles have impacted the satellite and done some damage.
31:17You can cut a cable easily or you can damage some structural parts.
31:22So it certainly will happen and it has happened in space.
31:24Envysat is now totally out of control.
31:31It's hurtling blindly around the world in the same orbital path as many other Earth observational satellites.
31:40So what we're seeing here, this is the view from Envysat as it's traveling around the Earth.
31:50These are all the other debris objects that we can currently track from the ground.
31:55As we're moving along the orbit here, all you see is that there are plenty of objects that are passing in front of Envysat, in some cases passing right next to Envysat.
32:05You know, when we get to the poles like this, you can see just how crowded the environment actually is.
32:13And Envysat is just going through that now without any kind of control.
32:17So there's no way it can maneuver to avoid any collision.
32:21Some of these things passing 14 kilometers per second.
32:24There's huge amounts of energy that's involved.
32:25There's huge amounts of energy that's involved.
32:26hmmm.
32:33.
32:35Where would modern civilization be without satellites?
32:38Where would modern civilization be without satellites?
32:51Could we learn to live without GPS, weather forecasts, and cell phones?
32:57We may need to, if our satellites fall victim to the junk we've been leaving in orbit for the last 50 years.
33:07Cleaning up Earth's orbits is a priority for many of today's leading aerospace engineers.
33:18The British satellite company Airbus wants to retrieve disabled satellites before they break up into disruptive clouds of shrapnel.
33:29Airbus builds some of the most complex satellites in the world.
33:33We can't afford to see new satellites destroyed by old ones.
33:43Inside a small lab, Airbus engineers are developing a way to snag a whale of a target in space, using a deceptively old-fashioned weapon.
33:57A harpoon.
34:05This demonstration allows us to prove that we can target a small object, a very lightweight object, very accurately.
34:12If we can do that, then we can certainly go and capture very big objects and very heavy objects, which is essentially the main targets that we want to capture.
34:22Their plan?
34:34Launch a remote-controlled chaser spacecraft, which would carefully approach a defunct satellite, then fire the harpoon.
34:41So this system will capture those items of debris, tow them out of the orbits where they might collide with active satellites, and allow them to burn up safely in the atmosphere.
35:00So the idea is to have a system which takes them away from where they cause a problem, and basically destroy them safely.
35:09Not everyone in the scientific community is on board with a harpoon solution.
35:21You're firing something, it's going to be traveling pretty quickly, and it's going to hit the other spacecraft.
35:30Okay, and that's kind of the situation that we're trying to avoid in the first place.
35:33We're artificially generating a collision here.
35:36The whole point of this spacecraft, of removing that big junk, is that we reduce the number of objects that we have on orbit.
35:44So we don't want to be generating any new debris.
35:54A harpoon striking a satellite could cause more harm than good.
36:02Where on that spacecraft are you going to fire your harpoon?
36:04You know, there are all sorts of things inside there that, you know, potentially you can have problems with.
36:09On the inside of the satellite, we have things like propulsion lines, which you can see here, which carry the propellant for the thrusters.
36:19And electronics boxes and various other bits of equipment.
36:22So when we punch through this panel, we need to take into account that there might be this sort of equipment on the other side.
36:30Hitting a satellite's extremely volatile propellant with a harpoon would almost certainly cause an explosion.
36:42But if harpooning space junk isn't the answer, what is?
37:00The orbits around our planet are full of space junk.
37:14But the scientific community has a few ideas for clearing it out of the way.
37:20There are many ways to push orbital debris down into the atmosphere, where they will burn up on re-entry.
37:26Including capturing them in a net.
37:31Sticking a magnetic thruster onto the junk.
37:35Physically grabbing a drifting satellite.
37:39Firing a laser beam to lower its orbit.
37:42Or we could send the trash to deep space using giant solar radiation sails.
37:47But can we really clean up millions of individual trash fragments that range from tiny paint flecks to giant rocket bodies?
37:57Have we passed the point of no return?
38:00If I take off a certain number of objects over a certain period of time, I'm going to reduce the probability of collision.
38:06Unfortunately, from the analysis that's been done, it's about 35 to 50 removals to prevent one collision.
38:13That's not great.
38:16Right? A lot of people think, I remove one object, I've stopped one breakup.
38:20That is not the way it's going to work.
38:22It's statistical in nature. It's being very proactive.
38:25Doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.
38:26But it's not one for one.
38:27It's going to be a huge, huge cost.
38:30Do we spend the money on removing all these objects?
38:36Or let's not spend the money.
38:38Let's leave all the objects in orbit and then we take the risk.
38:42Some of those are going to be hit.
38:43They're going to generate more fragments.
38:45And we end up in the situation where, you know, the Earth orbit is completely congested, full of fragments, and we can't launch new space missions.
38:53The United States is the 21st century's most powerful spacefaring nation, and it's trying to confront the problem.
39:04The U.S. federal government is spending a billion dollars on a new tracking system called SpaceFence.
39:10SpaceFence will provide the capability to detect, track, and catalog objects all the way from the baseball size down to sort of marble size depending on the altitude.
39:24So instead of just tracking 22,000 large objects, SpaceFence will keep tabs on 200,000 much smaller bits of deadly junk.
39:43To be honest, a lot of people would say, well, let's just put our head in the sand and ignore the problem.
39:48And, well, that's just a responsible way to look at the problem.
39:53You really, if you can see that debris and you can avoid that debris, you need to do everything you can to do that.
39:58Because every one of those events that is a collision creates thousands of other pieces of debris that you have to track.
40:04SpaceFence is a step in the right direction.
40:20But with millions of objects already orbiting Earth, and only a thousand or so that can actually be moved to avoid a collision,
40:28What are the odds that we'll still be able to operate safely in space 20, 40, 60 years from now?
40:39Can science make any worthwhile predictions?
40:43What I expect is going to happen is not going to be at all what anybody else that you're going to film is going to say.
40:49Because, and I don't know what the answer is, so I'm just going to tell you, you have to live with ambiguity.
40:55And I believe that it will not unfold in a predictable, linear, consistent way from any way that we believe.
41:06It's going to be sporadic, and it's going to be unpredictable, and we're all going to act surprised.
41:11And myself, and Don Kessler, and Hugh Lewis are going to go back and go, the variance is large, we told you.
41:22Just got it in there, got a good setup.
41:26Right, that looks like it's in there.
41:28If Donald Kessler's calculations are right, and so far they have been, this is what the orbits around Earth will look like in the next few centuries.
41:43You know, we're using space all the time.
41:56You know, when we look into the future, that's only going to continue, and we're going to make more use of space.
42:02You know, if we're connected via space all the time, then space becomes our single point of failure, and we've got to tackle that problem.
42:10I want my kids and my kids' kids to be able to explore space.
42:24And if we ruin the environment, we can't do that.
42:28And that would be tragic, because my passion for space came when I was 10 years old and I watched Apollo 11,
42:35and I watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, and that magic that created that feeling in me that said, I want to do space.
42:44I want my kids and my kids' kids to have that opportunity, and if the space environment is ruined, that will never happen.
42:49Okay, I'm ready to receive it.
42:54Okay, I'm ready to receive it.
42:56You guys are awesome, are you?
42:59It's a good wiggle.
43:02It's tight test.
43:04At the end of vector, my toes will be pointed forward.
43:08Okay, they're coming on my way.
43:09On my way.
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