On March 29, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa), the American space agency, and its business partners are planning to send an unmanned rocket into space before a crewed one goes up.
What debris the rocket will leave behind in space is anybody's guess. Since Oct 4, 1957, when the then Union of Soviet Socialist Republics launched its Sputnik, we have left behind more than 60 years of debris in space. Now dumping junk in space is becoming commercial.
Having exhausted — or more accurately, exploited — the Earth, free market capitalism is heading up to spoil the infinite Universe. The international community must stop humans from turning space into what The Economist labels a "tragedy of the commons". We must not fail the Universe as we have failed the Earth.
Just look at the tragic fate of our two Earthly commons, oceans and atmosphere. There are a few ways of stopping mankind from turning space into a graveyard of junks but first let's look at the scale of the problem. Estimates of this debris vary as their sizes vary. The big, the small and the tiny. They are all there. Tiny doesn't mean puny either. Given the speed with which the fragments travel, a hit can be as powerful as a grenade. If The Economist is right, there are more than 20,000 being tracked now. That is not all there is to the story of the debris up there in what is called the low-Earth orbit (LEO).
ESA, the European Space Agency, says there are more than 750,000 the size of a euro and millions more that are smaller that are not being monitored.
Now for the tidying up of space. The obvious solution is to not send anything into space. This will be very hard to do. Space-bound nations and businessmen with cosmic cunning will argue us into a corner.
Perhaps, we should begin with putting a stop to commercial launches such as the orbital test flight that is planned for March 29. But who will police this? One answer is The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 (TOST). There is a downside, though. Like the United Nations Convention for the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS), TOST is known for being ignored. Neither UNCLOS nor TOST has the municipal law's equivalent to enforce its judgement.
A second way of sweeping up the debris is that of ESA's €86 million effort. Called ClearSpace, ESA is working with a Swiss start-up, ClearSpace SA, to send a sort of space debris-sweeper. But this is only a small step, not a giant leap, for mankind for three reasons.
Firstly, it is not going to happen until 2025. In between expect hundreds of satellites to be launched. Secondly, ClearSpace-1, as it is called, is meant to bring home only one of the many floating in LEO, the upper part of Vega Secondary Payload Adapter. Thirdly, it will only sweep European debris.
Be that as it may, ESA is touting it as Earth's first space debris removal mission. Finally, and if we have to continue with our space missions, is to invent a spacecraft or a satellite that self-destructs, without leaving behind any debris. Or invent one which comes home to be safely burned off in the Earth's atmosphere.
Either way, the science to make this happen may be some distance away. Until then we have to keep looking up.