31 May 2022 – This month’s space issues video by GN board member Will Griffin explores the mostly ignored problem of space junk.

With the current plan to launch tens of thousands of new satellites into orbit for 5G by SpaceX (Elon Musk) and other aerospace corporations, the crowding of already dangerously unstable orbits is worsening by the day.

SpaceX makes rockets and satellites to build Starlink, a broadband Internet system that once is completed will cover the entire world. SpaceX has so far put 2,500 satellites into orbit with rockets carrying 50 satellites at a time and plans to place 42,000 Starlink satellites in low orbit occupying 80% of this space.

Starlink was presented as a commercial satellite system but has fundamental military applications. In fact, satellites in low orbit transmit signals at a much higher speed than those in geosynchronous orbit around the equator. The US Army and Air Force fund and test Starlink to use its military capabilities. For example, last March, the US Air Force reported that conventional and nuclear dual-capacity F-35A fighters had carried out data transmission using Starlink satellites at speed 30 times faster than traditional connections.

Scientists have long been warning about the coming Kessler Syndrome – the point when cascading collisions begin to create so much flying debris that bigger objects like the International Space Station and other satellites smash into one another creating a mine field of junk orbiting the Earth.

The space environment (like oceans, lakes and rivers on Earth) is becoming contaminated beyond our imagination.

This video raises the serious question – at what point does Earth go dark as satellites that run much of the modern world are smashed to bits?

Regulation is needed to limit the numbers of satellite launches into these already crowded orbits.

Any war in the heavens would exacerbate the problem beyond our imagination.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkzEXTwN6P0