The Soviet Union set off the space race in 1957 with its launch of the Sputnik satellite into orbit. The U.S.S.R.-U.S. competition culminated in 1969 with Apollo 11’s landing on the moon and planting the American flag.
Sputnik circled earth for about four months until the one-hundred-eighty-pound satellite’s elliptical orbit deteriorated. It incinerated when it re-entered the atmosphere. Since that time thousands of objects have been hurled into space, nearly five-hundred in the last year. Only a few met Sputnik’s end. Most of it is still up there.
An estimated thirty-four-thousand man-made objects are orbiting earth: five-thousand satellites — mostly non-functioning — and all sizes and shapes of miscellaneous debris. All this junk is cluttering orbital paths, leaving little room for newer satellites.
(Elon Musk’s Tesla roadster is presently somewhere between Mars and Jupiter, on its way back from a turn around the sun.)
The European Space Agency has decided to do something about it. (You didn’t think the U.S. or Russia would, did you?) E.S.A. has contracted with a Swiss company to develop a space garbage collector. The target date is 2025 to launch ClearSpace-1. This initial mission will be to capture a two-hundred-fifty-pound piece of debris left behind from a rocket launched in 2013.
The project manager says ClearSpace-1 will use a “Pac-Man system” to collect the trash.
