Space: so vast, so open. And yet, so littered with junk.
Hundreds of thousands of pieces of man-made debris are floating around out there, the detritus of more than 50 years of spaceflight. There have been chunks of dead satellites and spent rocket boosters — even a glove that an astronaut dropped in 1965 and a spatula that escaped from a space shuttle in 2006.
Because it zips along faster than a speeding bullet, the trash poses an ever-growing threat to the satellites that help the military communicate and gather intelligence and serve the world’s obsession with Google Earth and on-demand movies. Until last year, the Pentagon used what was called a “Space Fence” to track the junk and warn of potential collisions that make owners scramble to move their satellites out of the way.
But that system managed to keep up with only a fraction of it all, and it went out of commission last year. Now the Air Force is poised to take a more modern crack at the problem with a new Space Fence.
With a contract expected to be awarded in the next few weeks, the program is designed to be mankind’s best effort yet at tracking space pollution. But the new Space Fence still doesn’t provide what many think is the ultimate solution: cleaning up space.
“There’s a lot of stuff up there, and the impact of the new Space Fence will be to track more objects and smaller objects,” said Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College.
Tracking the debris “is a necessity, but not sufficient,” she said. “We need to move on to an active plan for removal.”
Tracking smaller debris
The fence isn’t really a fence, but rather a high-frequency radar that is like a flashlight beam in a dark room that illuminates the bits of dust swirling around. All those little bits are then catalogued and tracked as they pass through the radar again and again, until analysts, using massive computer databases, can predict where those pieces of debris will be in the future and when they might come close enough to collide with something.
The new system is vital, officials say, because it will be able to track more and much smaller pieces of debris, which can whip around the globe as fast as 17,000 miles per hour. At that velocity, even something just a half-inch around would pack a punch like a bowling ball traveling at 300 mph, according to NASA.
“It’s absolutely essential,” said Todd Harrison, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “It’s the most basic level of defense: You can’t defend against it, if you don’t know what’s there. . . . And we don’t want to be playing Russian roulette with our military space systems.”
After an intense competition that has gone on for several years and has already resulted in the awards of millions of dollars for prototypes, the high-stakes bidding has been whittled down to two competitors: defense giants Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.