Science Project

Welcome back to Spacetime Stories Podcast. I'm your host, Yosef, and next to me we will be interviewing an expert in space trash at NASA named Dr. Myles Lipson, PhD in astrophysics with a degree in aerospace engineering. How are you, Myles? I'm doing splendid. Yourself? I'm doing great. Today, you will be listening to studies that were researched by Dr. Myles like the current state of our progress in the cleanup of space trash and material we use like the price range of the cleanup progress. Myles, what threat does space trash have to us? Space trash currently does not pose a big threat to Earth. There is a potential for it to cause major problems. One of those problems that could occur was an idea proposed by a fellow NASA scientist, Dr. Kessler, called the Kessler Syndrome, which describes a situation where if there was too much space junk in our orbit, it could result in a change of reaction where more and more objects collide and create new space junk in the process to the point where Earth's orbit would become unusable, which would not be good because then we could not travel into space. That is good to know. What is the potential for this problem to escalate? The possibility of space trash becoming a bigger issue is somewhat high because we keep sending more and more satellites to space. When they finish their missions, the companies who send them have up to 25 years to get them back down to Earth. In that window, they have the possibility of crashing into each other, causing more space debris, which is not good. What solutions do we have as of now? Currently we have deorbit robots that go into space and grab onto the trash like a claw machine would, and then they bring them back down to Earth, which is the only solution we have at the moment, but more are being developed as we speak. I have my team working on that right now. What could happen if we don't fix it now? If we don't start working on creating a solution, it can escalate. Maybe not in my lifetime or yours, but this has the potential to become a bigger problem if we do not start developing and creating solutions, which we have some solutions now, but we still need to develop and create them and then send them into space to test them. Okay. I was scrolling on my phone a couple of days ago, and I came across an article about the price range of space trash, right? So as of now, I saw that we are looking around at hundreds of millions of dollars. Do you have an idea of how much space trash would cost? Yeah. Space trash is very expensive. So there's a lot of satellites and rocket parts that are still up there, and they're just in our atmosphere and can't come down. Some manage to come down, which is good, and kind of burn up in our upper atmosphere, but there's a lot of trash up there that consists of rockets and satellites, which are from previous missions that companies have sent when they send up their rockets or just like NASA sending up rockets. It's very expensive stuff up there, but we are working on bringing it down and figuring out how to do that. How does this impact the people as of right now? The impact of space trash only affects a very small percentage of people, like myself and companies sending satellites and rockets into space. The issue could affect more people if space travel becomes more of a general thing that everybody does, but as of right now, it doesn't really affect many people because it's just a thing that's in space, and not everybody goes to space. But it definitely has the potential for impacting more people in the future, but I don't believe you or I will see that in our lifetimes. What is the status of the environmental cleanup? Progress for building these robots is moving along and so far doing well. My group has been doing very well at creating ideas and designing how we are going to do this. We've come up with one design as of right now, but multiple are kind of in the process. We have something that kind of looks like a claw machine with a rocket on the back to propel it back to Earth. That's kind of what we have going right now. Well, thanks for tuning in into our Space Time Stories with our special guest, Dr. Miles. Thank you so much for having me. I hope to come back soon. Make sure to tune in to our future episodes and buy our limited edition merch. We're out. Thank you again. Hello. On today's episode... On today's episode...