In the past couple of decades, humans have succeeded in penetrating the atmosphere and reaching their technological arm out in space. Today, with over six thousand satellites revolving around the earth, and thousands more sequenced to be launched, an enigma feared while the human inception into space is resurfacing, Space Junk.
But, how did space become the biggest junkyard? Why is space junk concerning? And what can be done to tackle the global issue?
What is Space Junk?
Ever since the beginning, the concerns about a potential outer-space junkyard created by space debris, satellites, bolts, and as little as chips of paint revolving around the globe at very high speed were on the plate. The issues related to space junk have been very well portrayed in movies like Gravity and WALL-E,as fictional it may seem, but with the recent spike in the satellites reaching the earth’s orbits, is already fretting government and concerned organizations globally.
But what exactly is space junk?
Unlike earth, when equipment expires or satellites’ lifetime is over they are not brought down or thrown in outer space. Instead, since already in a free-fall, they keep on revolving in their defined trajectory forever. For example, according to Geo Spatial World, as of January 2021, there are nearly 6,542 satellites orbiting the earth, of which only 3,372 are functioning, while the rest are inactive. But, they are still in their fixated orbit, revolving around the earth.
Moreover, anything from spent rockets to stray bolts to the tiniest flecks of paint, all form the space junk. In a nutshell, space junk is any material or machinery left by humans in the inner and outer space. A majority of this junk is orbiting in the earth’s lower orbit, the closest and most used part of the earth. This lower orbit homes thousands of active and inactive satellites, including the international space station.
All of this is moving at speeds as high as 27,000 kilometers per hour. At this high speed, when even a baseball-sized piece hits something, it packs a punch. According to a report, today there are over 34,000 large pieces of debris, 3,000 dead satellites, and millions of smaller junk revolving over our heads.
The Accelerating Concern
While, currently, space junk is not a big problem, Blue Origin and SpaceX planning to launch an estimate of 50,000 satellites into orbit, the area around the earth could get a lot more congested, fueling bigger issues for future space missions.
But, modern life and technology depend on slate tiles, everything from GPS to the internet is all facilitated by them. Moreover, the advancements are making the launch of satellites easier and more feasible.
The sheer scale of debris in space has formed orbits just for inactive satellites, the graveyard orbits. No organization or government can be held solely responsible for the problem, every nation has played its role in filling the space with junk, exponentially increasing the collision risk. But, the collisions only contribute to 0.8% of all the space debris, the major contributor is blasts caused by leftover batteries, fuel, spacecraft, rockets, and energy.
Including the International Space Station, Collision Avoidance Maneuvers are performed by numerous satellites every year. In the past, the ISS has to change its trajectory over 30 times to avoid collisions.
Dr. Donald Kessler, NASA scientist, in the year 1970s, proposed the Kessler syndrome, a tipping point for the space junk. As more collisions and blasts of satellites take place, more junk is added to the orbit, creating an infinite cycle of space debris. This exponentially growing ring of junk around the globe can confine us to the earth.
Space Junk: What is the Solution?
A considerable amount of debris will burn up in Earth’s atmosphere after losing altitude over time. There is already so much space junk in Earth’s orbit that it is likely to continue multiplying for centuries to come as orbiting pieces collide.
According to computer simulations, debris larger than 8 inches across will more than double in size during the next 200 years. Smaller particles, however, will double even faster. A pile of debris between four and eight inches is expected to multiply 3.2 times, while that beneath four inches will increase by 13 to 20 times.
Over the years, the constellation of satellites we see above has become increasingly important. In addition to being useful for science, they are also essential for communication, navigation, weather forecasting, etc. Therefore, rather than halting future launches, scientists are looking into a variety of methods to reduce and remove space junk.
There are a number of concepts in development to control space junk that resembles science fiction more than reality. Japanese space agency JAXA is testing what is known as the electrodynamic tether (EDT), a six-foot-long electronic space whip. Almost 2,300 feet of electrified line are capped by a 44-pound weight. The device is designed to knock debris out of orbit, causing it to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.
That is by no means the only option. In addition to giant magnets, harpoons, and nets, whittle-down the debris cloud safely is proposed with giant magnets, harpoons, and nets. The problem is being fought from both sides of the equation. Many nations are taking steps to ensure that future orbiters launched above Earth’s surface will have a safe end-of-life plan to limit the growing debris cloud enveloping the planet.
I realize that the title of this article might offend and provoke many people, especially those adhering to the Judaic faith. I do know that Jews, like everyone else, are not carbon copies of each other. There are many conscientious Jews who believe in fairness and basic human equality regardless of color, race and faith, and strongly reject racism and chauvinism in any form. Also, I will no longer be using euphemistic language in reference to Jewish Nazism especially in light of the latest Dresden-like bombing of Gaza by the Judeo-Nazi state also known as Israel.
These people I salute for their rectitude, humanity and morality. They are our natural partners for peace and a better tomorrow for our children and their children.
But there are numerous other Jews who don’t believe in human equality and justice for all. Indeed, there are many Jews, e.g. followers of the hateful Chabad sect, who don’t even ascribe full humanity to people who are not members of the Jewish faith.
Needless to say, the venomous ideology adopted by these racist fanatics has much in common with Aryan Nazism.
What else can be said to describe an ideology that teaches adherents that the life of a non-Jew has no sanctity and that goyem can be murdered without the slightest compunction or feeling of guilt?
The shocking reactions by the Israeli government, rabbis, and community leaders to the latest abduction, murder and subsequent burning of a Palestinian kids in Gaza are very telling.
In a certain sense, these reactions and attitudes can be compared to the reactions and attitudes of many Germans to the pogroms carried out against Jews by the Nazis prior to and during the Second World War.
The gleefully despicable embrace of the brashly hideous crime by the bulk of the Israeli Jewish society underscores the fact that millions of Jews in Israel and abroad do harbor certain Nazi tendencies, especially against the Palestinian people. These tendencies are too real and too tangible to be overstated.
However, we must call the spade a spade, even at the expense of upsetting the huge Zionist propaganda machine which habitually alters the black into white and the blatant big lie into a “truth” glorified by sheepish westerners who have long been brainwashed into believing that Israel is a modern, civilized and democratic state.
In the final analysis, when Jews (or anyone else) think, behave and act like the Nazis thought, behaved and acted, they simply become Nazis. Pure and simple.
Today, there are numerous Jews who openly call for the physical annihilation of Palestinians as retaliation for the abduction and killing of three Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
Saber-rattling rabbis speak menacingly of the need to adopt “the Biblical way” to combat the Palestinians.
For those not versed in Jewish phraseology, “Biblical way” is euphemism for genocide.
Today, the Israeli media reported that some army personnel openly appealed to the government to “give us the green light to annihilate them.”!!!
Just read what thousands of Jewish youths have been writing on their Facebook pages! It is outrageous, disgusting and sheer evil.
To put it in a nutshell, Nazism is being regurgitated and exuded all over Israel. This is happening in broad daylight while professional liars like Binyamin Netanyahu are filling the ether with all sorts of shameless lies about Israel being victimized by the Palestinians.
Seventy-six years have passed since Kristalnacht. Today Jewish settlers in the west Bank, in close cooperation and coordination, with the Israeli army could very well carry out a huge pogrom against an innocent and helpless community which really finds itself very much in the same precarious and vulnerable position that European Jewry experienced prior to WWII.
I am not a prophet of doom and gloom, but the signs are unmistakably bleak.
A final point, the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are surviving thanks to the good-will of the international public opinion. Should the international community go into a brief slumber, God forbid, Israel and its own Wehrmacht, SS, Gestapo and Hitler Youth might embark on the unthinkable. Don’t you ever say Jews can’t carry out a holocaust against their victims, the Palestinians?
Words can kill; words do kill.
Unfortunately, the chilling words we are hearing from many Israeli Jews these days leave no room for optimism.
Khalid Amayreh is a Palestinian journalist and political commentator , we lost him on account of natural reasons on 12th of July last year in the Occupied Palestine
In-your-face brutality, unending genocide, unending atrocities, mass slaughter directed against one’s people, one’s brethren, causes the most strong and unimaginable reaction, in response to the oppressor’s horrendous and barbaric deeds. The autocratic, despotic, tyrannical Israeli-hand systematically and with pre-planned engineered precision, massacres, annihilates, eliminates the young and the old Palestinian alike – in the most inhumane and most despicable of ways. Slaughters men, women and children in broad daylight. Bares its blood-thirsty intentions, its monstrous objectives in the most unashamed of ways. Mercy to none – not to the living, not to the severely wounded and dying; no mercy even on the dead or their lifeless remains.
The constant fear of being bombed anytime, rained down with missiles and all manner of munitions from within the vast arsenal of the Israeli side; definitely stockpiled high, with enough buffer inventory of munitions, deadly and lethal stockpile, to blow the receiving side multiple times over; so as not to leave a “shred” of evidence of your original physical-self on the surface of the land, which your people, generations and generations of your ancestors, since time immemorial have dwelt on.
The inexplicable terror of seeing Israeli drones constantly “floating about” unopposed, in the skies above your unsheltered head. Drones with eyes like that of a greedy dog. Electronic pixels wanting to cast an evil eye, an evil-spell upon your very being. Eyeing upon your existence, wanting to blow-up, tear-up your physical being, seemingly wanting to devour your flesh and body; all by way of a few computer clicks / even the manual computer-clicks now, seemingly, are being replaced by more automated ways of executing these most evil deeds. Software, coded software, written programs to execute on the most Evil-intentions. Evil-intentions of the most evil amongst the human race.
Everybody knows, the Israelis have exterminated with their weaponry, uncountable numbers of Palestinians across a 40, 50km stretch of land, in front of the whole world, over the past so many weeks and months. And retain the capacity, the ability, the power, the means to slaughter, devour many, many more innocent ones, day in, day out.
The Israelis possess American technology, American weapons – the bedrock of their faith, the foundation stone of their belief in their never-ending invincibility. The Palestinians have their faith in Allah; that Allah will redeem his faithful people, from the clutches of these war-mongers, who rain down terror, day and night on the most innocent, the most vulnerable.
Most definitely, the Moslem spirit in me, the Palestinian spirit in me is not defeated; quite to the contrary, it’s rekindled, stronger than ever.
I’m definitely Palestinian, in every sense of the word, and Allah will save us, Allah will have mercy on us, Allah will guide us.
(Note: Azhaar Amayreh is a marketer stuck in war-ravaged Rafah with her child.)The following article is part of a campaign to raise money to help MZEMO contributor Azhaar Amayreh and her family leave Gaza. Please give what you can.
It is really ludicrous to see how dishonest the U.S “mediators” constantly demand that the Palestinians display more “good will” toward Israel at a time when Israel continues to perpetrate a real Holocaust against the hapless and helpless Palestinaians and steal Palestinian land in broad daylight.
It seems amply clear that the current Palestinian leadership, i.e. the Palestinian Authority (PA) led by Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, neither learns from its own blunders nor from other people’s blunders. This is really a gigantic disaster befalling the Palestinian people and their enduring just cause.
How else can one relate to the unrelenting illogical insistence of the the whole world on accepting the U.S., Israel’s guardian-ally, as “mediator and honest broker” between us and our murderous tormentors and grave-diggers, Israel?
Indeed, one doesn’t have to be an expert on American foreign policy in the Middle East to know that the U.S represents the problem, not the solution, given its long-standing embrace of Israeli fascism and expansion. After all, it is the US that not only enabled Israel to actively pursue its lebensraum policy at the expense of its neighbors but consistently shield it from any accountability or international condemnation.
Today, the U.S. administration is criticizing Palestinian “unilateralism” in reference to desperate PA efforts to get the UN Security Council to recognize Palestinian statehood and agree on a deadline for ending Israel’s Nazi-like occupation.
Well, we all know that the U.S. is being pornographically hypocritical when it accuses the virtually vanquished Palestinians of acting unilaterally as if its spoilt nefarious daughter, Israel, were ever acting in full conformity with international law.
Well, Mr. Abbas and Mr. Ereikat: Don’t be too gullible, too sheepish. Ask your American interlocutors, e.g. Mr. John Kerry, the following questions:
Since when did Israel ever behave bilaterally rather than unilaterally?
Was the usurpation of Palestine and expulsion of its indigenous people at the hands of Jewish terrorist gangs hailing from Eastern Europe, a bilateral or unilateral act?
Was the annexation by Israel of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights a bilateral or a unilateral act?
Was the building of hundreds of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well as the transfer of 600,000 Jewish settlers to live on a land that belongs not to them a bilateral or unilateral act?
Was the wanton demolition of some 30,000 Palestinian homes by Israel a bilateral or a unilateral act?
Was the annexation of the bulk of the West Bank and East Jerusalem a bilateral or a unilateral act?
And what about this ugly structure, called Separation wall, which resulted in the theft of thousands of acres of private Palestinian land? Was it a bilateral or a unilateral act?
I could go on and on and on listing America’s hypocritical and duplicitous stands on Palestinian grievances and Israeli crimes. Indeed, the U.S dishonest stand on the Palestinian plight has only been consistent in its moral depravity. Indeed, hypocrisy in its most brazen form has always been and continues to be the modus operandi of American policy toward the Palestinian issue. I know it is politically incorrect to speak in this tone. However, truth must not be another victim of the dark evil embrace between the U.S. and Israel.
But morality is not and has never been part of American politics or policies, especially foreign policy. This is why the world looks so ugly, so gloomy and so unjust.
The U.S. is insisting that only a “negotiated” settlement to the Palestinian issue would be acceptable to the U.S.
In other words, Israel must always have the final say as to any possible peace deal with the Palestinians.
But since Israel would never ever end its occupation or dismantle the settlements, let alone allow for the repatriation of the refugees, it means there can be no negotiated settlement unless the Palestinians agree to surrender to Jewish Nazism. But that will never happen as Muslims, including the Palestinian people, would never allow the Ramallah leadership or any other leadership to commit adultery with the honorable Palestinian cause.
Let’s be honest. The purportedly honest American broker or mediator is neither honest nor a broker or mediator. The proverbial American judge is simply telling the insolent rapist (Israel) and the vanquished rape victim (the Palestinians) to sort it out amongst yourselves. Do we have to be the smartest humans on earth to understand the implications of this brutal ugliness?
It is tantamount to a total American embrace of Israeli fascism. It means that the American stance is actually Israel’s stance. It also means that that the U.S. would never accept or condone any settlement that Israel doesn’t accept.
That is why the Palestinians need to have a moment of truth with themselves. And the message they need to internalize is that they would have to wait ages if they continued to put their trust in the U.S. to pressure Israel to walk in the path of peace.
Let us face it. Israel will never walk in the path of peace unless it is pressured and bullied to do so. However, Israel would never ever walk in the path of peace as long as it continues to receive nuclear submarines from Germany and the most advanced fighter jets from the U.S.
In a nut shell, America can’t and won’t exert any meaningful pressure on Israel to end its N-a-z-i-like occupation. We all know that Israel controls the American government or at least controls those who control the American government. Israel is intoxicated by its arrogance of power and Talmudic insolence. And the U.S., Israel’s guardian-ally, is not in a position to be an honest mediator and to impose a deal on Israel or even convince her to allow for one that would give the Palestinian a semblance of justice.
What should be done?
We must go ahead with our efforts at the U.N. Security Council, irrespective of American threats to veto any resolution favorable to the Palestinian cause. At least casting the veto would embarrass America itself and its treacherous Arab allies (they are not actually allies but cheap slaves and puppets as we all know).
We Palestinians must be confident of our inevitable triumph over Zionism and its evils. Yes, it may take time, but eventually Zionism won’t live forever in a sea where hundreds of millions live.
Khalid Amayreh is a Palestinian journalist and political commentator , we lost him on account of natural reasons on 12th of July last year in the Occupied Palestine
