SpaceX’s Falcon 9 space vehicle lifted off from Launch Complex 40, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on February 11, 2015. The rocket had powered the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite as SpaceX’s first deep space mission. As an errant SpaceX rocket booster traverses toward the moon, space agencies are trying to deal with the giant space garbage.
In an article first published by Wired not to alarm you, it said that a SpaceX Falcon 9 second-stage rocket booster is on the way to smash into the moon. The giant tin can have been traveling around the Earth and moon for almost seven years now. It’s been there since it deployed DSCOVER, a space weather-monitoring spacecraft for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2015. Now, its wandering will end when it crashes into the far side of the moon in March, according to projections by Bill Gray. Gray is responsible for software for tracking near-Earth objects.
Accordingly, it will be the first piece of space debris to smash into the moon. But it is not expected to be harmful. However, it’s an indication of a bigger problem. Several broken boosters have been abandoned in orbit around the Earth and sun over the past few decades. Their impending giant space garbage poses risks of impacts with other active spacecraft. These include satellites that provide GPS, communications, broadband, and other services we need.
Recently, news coverage has focused on the threats of small shrapnel, like the bits from a derelict satellite that Russia blasted off in November. Afterward, it nearly sideswiped the International Space Station. But nobody knows how things would get worse.
“Every year, there are at least two school bus-sized materials that come within 100 meters of crashing. And if they collided, it would be an order of magnitude riskier than the worst anti-satellite test.” – Brian Weeden, Director of Program Planning, Secure World Foundation.
A May 2021 NASA report says that over 27,000 pieces of orbital debris or space garbage are tracked by the Department of Defense’s global Space Surveillance Network (SSN) sensors. Regardless of its size, each piece of junk is large enough to threaten human spaceflight and robotic missions.
The growing number of space debris increased the potential threat to all space vehicles. That’s why the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has established guidelines to deal with the potential dangers.
Space Debris – A History
The oldest giant piece of space junk dates back to 1959. A Vanguard rocket body was abandoned after deploying a US Navy weather satellite. Said satellite was one of the early tests of the Space Age rivalry between the US and USSR. It was also one of the first tracked orbiting objects.
Back then, as the space race picked up, the discarded rocket bodies piled up. And they are part of the multi-stage rockets needed to propel a spacecraft into orbit or beyond the Earth. Once the upper-stage rocket booster deploys that craft, it is either left in orbit or similar trajectory. Some even have leftover fuel left which would create a more hazardous explosion.
Now, there could be massive amounts of depleted rocket boosters floating haphazardly in orbit, Weeden said. Those are the ones in low Earth orbit.
“Any time we could put something into interplanetary orbit or deep space sensors, there is a possible booster connected with it. Space is so immense that people never think about it,” Bruce McClintock said. McClintock is the head of the Space Enterprise Initiative of the Rand Corporation non-profit in Santa Monica, California.
The first booster that accidentally ended up orbiting the sun arrived there in 1959. McClintock said a Soviet lunar mission planned to propel a spacecraft into the moon, but the upper-stage rocket failed, and it narrowly missed its target. When SpaceX launched a red Tesla buggy four years ago with a spacesuit-clad dummy driver, it ended up in a solar orbit, too.
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