Originally published on Scientific American.
Samantha Lawler He is an associate professor of astronomy at the University of Regina.
The email arrived like a bolt out of the blue on an otherwise normal Thursday afternoon, May 9. The message was from a journalist, asking to interview me the astronomer about a farmer who reportedly found fields while preparing space junk for spring seeding, just an hour drive from my home in Saskatchewan is far away. As I hit my affirmative answer, I thought to myself, “Yeah, right. Already the odds are high for any given spot on Earth to be hit by orbital debris—so the chances of it actually making little sense astronomically in the back yard of someone like me researching the issue is simply too remote to be be true.
A quick check of the news proved me wrong. One of the top stories was about beating up space junk, and even included a photo of the farmer, Barry Sawchuk, standing next to what looked like the scorched, battered hood of a semi-truck covered in molten carbon fiber and a few protrusions of slightly molten aluminum . My jaw dropped in shock: the object looked exactly like debris that crashed into an Australian sheep farm in 2022, which US aerospace company SpaceX later admitted was part of the cargo box for the Crew Dragon spacecraft. This “hammer” is actually the size of a small grain silo, and exits orbit long before the spacecraft returns to the atmosphere, to rebound in its natural, chaotic fashion and, supposedly, burn up completely.
To confirm my guess, I immediately emailed my colleague Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and the Smithsonian, which may maintain the best overall database of launches, re-entries and other space activities. McDowell responded within minutes, providing a graphic showing the trunk trajectory of a SpaceX Crew Dragon carried by. Axiom 3 The special air mission that had come back over the Canadian prairies on February 26, 2024.
As an astronomer, I already had good reason to be concerned about SpaceX. The company will launch a large number of Starlink internet broadband satellites from 2019; More than 6,000 are in orbit and 42,000 are planned. As Starlink grew—along with competing plans for other satellite “superstars”—my telescope data and huge prairie sky filled with bright, easily visible satellites just as many astronomers (including myself) had warned. But beyond this destructive light pollution, new research shows that atmospheric pollution is rising due to the dramatic increase in SpaceX-dominated launches and re-entries—with catastrophic global implications. It turns out, the aluminum oxide produced by satellites rising in Earth’s upper atmosphere is a powerful and persistent catalyst for chemical reactions similar to the 20th-century chemical reactions that corroded a gaping hole in our planet’s fragile, radioactive ozone layer.
Those of us who are fortunate enough to be able to escape urban light pollution find it to mean spectators to this pollution of the sky; We look up, feel traumatized, and look away. This latest situation, coupled with the company’s activities that showered my neighbors with hazardous waste, somehow felt more personal. So I decided to act, and help hold SpaceX accountable.
stick: The space debris of the SpaceX Dragon capsule crashed in the mountains of North Carolina. I had to go see it (video)
I got Sawchuk’s phone number from the journalist who called me and the farmer took my call from the cab of his tractor busy seeding. He was extremely frustrated that SpaceX had been allowed to dump its orbital garbage on his farm, and assumed the best response was to tell his story in the news media. But the initial response was subdued; Most journalists didn’t follow up on a rural Saskatchewan farmer who said he found a piece of space junk. Sawchuk gave me permission to transfer his phone number to curious minds, on one condition: “I don’t answer text messages while I’m driving the tractor!” I started compiling a list of every specialist in space law and orbital debris I could think of to seek advice from.
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